Border Ecology: Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins 3031259521, 9783031259524

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Border Ecology Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins

Ila Nicole Sheren

Border Ecology

Ila Nicole Sheren

Border Ecology Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins

Ila Nicole Sheren Department of Art History and Archaeology Washington University in St. Louis St Louis, MO, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-25952-4    ISBN 978-3-031-25953-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Objects   5 Decolonizing New Materialism  13 Diffraction and Entanglement  21 Border Ecology  24 Eco Art  30 Chapter Overview  38 2 The  Boundaries of the Map 41 What is Missing? as an Interactive Digital Experience  48 Maya Lin and the Memorial  54 Land Art  59 The Database and the Archive  68 Digital Eco-Spectacle and the Call to Action  74 Connection and Disjuncture: The 2015 What is Missing?   80 3 Landscapes  of Slow Violence 85 New Landscapes and Unregistered Cities: Modernization and Development in Chinese Photography  90 Ambience and the Drone Aesthetic in Mitra Azar’s Scars & Borders  98 Leveling Human and Nonhuman: Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World  105 Conclusions and New Questions 112 v

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Contents

4 Entanglements115 Manthan in Context 120 The River as Paradox 124 The Toxic Sublime 130 The Scene of Crime 138 Conclusions 145 5 Border Crossers147 Watershed Cairns  150 Crossing from the Material to the Virtual 154 Border Thinking and Vital Materialism 159 Glass, Light, and the Romantic Sublime 164 Bear 71  169 Borders Crossers as Disobedient Objects 182 6 Conclusions  and New Directions: Border Art for a Border Ecology185 Bibliography193 Index207

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Joana Moll, DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST. Website2 Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Raptor’s Rapture (2012). Still from digital video 7 Samuel Finley Breese, Niagara Falls from Table Rock (1835). Oil on canvas 44 Maya Lin, Competition Drawings for Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981) 56 The view from Double Negative, showing the edge of Mormon Mesa. Image courtesy of the author 62 Sharon Switzer, #Crazyweather (2013). Stills from digital video 72 Vibha Galhotra, Manthan (2015). Stills from digital video 116 The Churning of the Ocean of Milk (India, 1780–1790) 121 Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario (1996)132 Amar Kanwar, Scene of Crime (2011). Still from digital video 142 Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, Silver Creek Spire - Pond (2013) from the series Watershed Cairns (2011–present) 151 Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, FLOWer Sewer (2014) from the series Watershed Cairns (2011–present) 162 Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, Park Bridge 2 (2015) from the series Watershed Cairns (2011–present) 165

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, Tethys Meramec Stump (2014) from the series Watershed Cairns (2011–present) Banff National Park, stock photo from Alamy Postcommodity, Repellent Fence installation view Susan Harbage Page, Anti-archive Object No. 15 (2008). Digital photograph

165 171 186 191

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the face of the Internet’s massive carbon footprint, coupled with the extractive technologies used to manufacture the devices, server components, and other platforms from which such projects are created and stored, how can eco art that is produced or distributed digitally stage a productive intervention? I contend that digital media enables scrutiny of the margins, the gaps, and the incongruities that defy traditional modes of representation. Such artworks span the boundaries between the virtual and the material, reminding the viewer of the chains of cause and effect that have very real repercussions in the physical world. While these qualities are not limited to the digital, of course, I will argue that because the viewer is primed to expect the unexpected, physically and temporally, such new media are well positioned to enable the kinds of juxtapositions that draw new connections and destabilize anthropocentric ways of thinking. With this goal in mind, imagine a visit to Joana Moll’s web-based artwork DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST. The viewer briefly glimpses a blank white page.1 Immediately, the space begins to fill with small green trees appearing from left to right and neatly arranged in a grid pattern (Fig.  1.1). The trees comprise nine different types—coniferous pines and deciduous species alike. There is no set pattern to their 1  http://www.janavirgin.com/CO2/DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST. html. I will abbreviate the title as Deforest for the remainder of this text, as per the convention of most media coverage of the piece.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. N. Sheren, Border Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1_1

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Fig. 1.1  Joana Moll, DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST. Website

appearance, but the subtle variations in color and height lend an unsettling rhythm to the page. One after another, the trees materialize too quickly for the viewer to keep proper pace. As the screen fills, the webpage begins to expand vertically, as row after row completes itself. Unceasing, the site throws up a forest of digital trees at a rate that becomes visually taxing and cognitively exhausting. With this approach, Deforest presents a computer interface beyond the user’s control, a self-perpetuating program, a viral reckoning within an ordered digital space.2 The trees appear at a constant rate of 23 per second. According to Moll’s calculations, this is the number of trees needed to counteract the carbon emissions of worldwide visits to Google.com.3 The full weight of the digital trees now descends upon the site visitor as the connections between online behavior and its effect on global climate come into view. Past Google searches, whether informative or pointless, are here represented by eternally propagating, digitally rendered trees: horror vacui as environmental horror. Moll describes her work in terms of a philosophical turn towards objects, things, and nonhumans. Quoting the philosopher Graham Harman, she writes, “we must remember that ‘everything is not connected.’ While humans are becoming increasingly machinelike and 2  See jodi.org’s“My desktop” (http://mydesktop.jodi.org/), which depicts banal elements of the computer interface (folders, windows, menus) mutating and replicating seemingly on their own, mining the aesthetics of the virus. 3  The figure Moll uses is 52,000 queries to the search engine per second, although it is not clear if this is only for searches undertaken from Google’s main portal.

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dependent on data, the connection between humans and their life giving natural habitats, is hastily fading away. We seem to have withdrawn into a machinic vacuum of reality which blinds us to the complexities of the world.”4 Harman’s evocation of a world of distinct objects disconnected from each other and from human perception forms the basis of his larger theorization of object oriented ontology (OOO). With her reference to Harman, Moll argues that her digital trees serve to reintroduce that lost connection between human beings and their environment in terms of the boundary between the virtual and the material. In other words, Deforest argues that every action online has its repercussions offline, and every click is both a digital action and a physical one. What is most telling, however, is a small disclaimer Moll places in brackets at the bottom of the project’s “about” page: “[On average, this project emits 0,04gr of CO2 per visit].” Here, the artist admits and quantifies her own culpability in the escalating, “super wicked problem” of climate change.5 Her work raises awareness of the Internet’s carbon usage even as it perpetuates and adds to the deficit. The site visitor, in turn, is also implicated, having made the choice to enter Deforest after being made aware of its carbon footprint.6 Artworks like Deforest pose a central question: What role exists for digital media, particularly Internet-based artworks, when artists address environmental crisis? The digital is necessarily extractive: it is a dematerialized product that exists upon a material scaffolding (the electric grid, lithium battery production, tech waste, mega-factories). So, what could justify the cost? To this end, there are some answers. Digital art is, for the most part, accessible. It capitalizes on the promise of the Internet to level the playing field. For example, to visit Mark Dion’s decaying tree installation Neukom Vivarium (2006), one must travel to Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Depending on distance, that could involve a lengthy drive, a flight, hotel stays, public transit, and many other demands upon the ecosystem. That 4  Joanna Moll, “About DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST,” http://www. janavirgin.com/CO2/DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST_about.html. 5  The “super wicked problem” is characterized by “four key features: time is running out; the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent; those who cause the problem also seek to create a solution; and hyperbolic discounting occurs that pushes responses irrationally into the future.” See Levin et. al, “Playing it Forward: Path Dependency, Progressive Incrementalism, and the “Super Wicked” Problem of Global Climate Change” IOP Conference Series Earth and Environmental Science 6(50) January 2007, 3. 6  To register my own culpability, I must admit that I visited Deforest at least ten times in the past hour of writing this text. I’m sure I will visit it again while revising.

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pilgrimage also costs the viewer in money and time, two resources that are not easily spared. A photograph or video walkthrough of the piece is simply not the same, for Neukom Vivarium must be experienced as a fully sensory, phenomenological encounter. An Internet-based artwork, on the other hand, is available as its intended experience for free, to anyone with access to the Internet. The 0.04 grams of carbon dioxide emitted per visit are dwarfed by the potential carbon output of that trip to Seattle. The promise of equal access, however, does not hold up under scrutiny. Of course, the Deforest website is free to visit. It doesn’t require a credit card number or bank account before giving way to that endless digital forest. That lack of financial transaction, however, does not take into account the barriers already in place prior to clicking on the artwork’s URL. High speed Internet is not free in most places on Earth and is limited in many regions. Although the advent of smartphones has made Internet access more available to populations either too impoverished or too remote for broadband, the availability of technology alone does not guarantee equal access. Access is also measured outside of economic criteria. The average Internet user will not simply stumble upon Moll’s piece in an afternoon of casual browsing. Even directed searching, actively looking for Internet artworks that raise environmental awareness, has no guarantee of unearthing Deforest.7 A holistic measure of access must take into account educational and social barriers as well as economic ones. The idealization of the digital as somehow leveling difference or flattening the earth overlooks the embedded hierarchies, invisible barriers, and concentrations of interest that shape the experience of the Internet according to each individual’s circumstances. A piece such as Deforest may have a tangible impact on Internet use, however, by raising awareness about the scale of the Internet’s carbon footprint. Indeed, a second project of Moll’s, CO2GLE, loads as a simple, text-based page with a single sentence “Google.com emitted _______KG of CO2 since you opened this page.”8 The number increases linearly, by approximately 500 kilograms per second. Those kilos add up quickly, and as with the digital trees, the constantly increasing number generates a level of anxiety in the visitor. There is no way to pause the site, no moment to 7  After a May 2018 write-up in Fast Company, however, Moll’s piece became easier to find through casual browsing. (https://www.fastcompany.com/90171268/ internet_impact_visualized). 8  http://www.janavirgin.com/CO2/.

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stop and reflect. The text-heavy nature of CO2GLE, however, denies the visitor the visual onslaught that overwhelms the similarly focused Deforest. The sheer scale of use, and the implication of waste, is more suited to the miniature trees than to the abstract nature of very large numbers. One can conceive of a tree, after all, its general proportions and scale, multiplied to the extremes demonstrated on the site. But a figure like 10,209.83 kilograms only registers in the abstract. Yes, the visitor sees the number rising, seemingly to infinity, but it lacks the visual excess that the digital forest connoted so aptly. Ultimately, the knowledge that actions on the Internet have an impact in the physical world, one quantified in terms of familiar, everyday objects, can instill a permanent association between online and offline behaviors. At the most basic level, the rapidly propagating trees of Deforest, with their evocation of the interface run amok enable such an effect. The viewer, powerless to stop the onslaught, is left with no choice but to leave the site or close the browser. In other cases, it is the mutability and personalization of much digital media, the invitation for viewers to insert themselves into the narrative, that, I argue, can enable the kinds of intellectual linkages necessary to address the physical and social realities of environmental crisis. In these pages, I will develop a theory that allows us to mediate between two major intellectual camps, the turn toward nonhuman agencies spurred by philosophers like Harman and the contributions of post- and decolonial theorists who position the human species as planetary colonizers. Additionally, in this book I will follow the example of physicist and gender theorist Karen Barad and their use of diffraction, or reading theoretical frameworks through each other, to mediate between the twin poles of matter and discourse. I analyze these digital environmental artworks as both object-driven and exemplifying a human-centered decolonizing dynamic, resulting in what I term a border ecology.

Objects Before delving fully into the world of border ecology, it helps to frame the theoretical approaches and their shortcomings that this concept mediates. Moll’s description of Deforest quotes philosopher Graham Harman, specifically his contention that “everything is not connected.” The phrase is taken from the title of a lecture Harman gave in Berlin in February 2012.9 9  Graham Harman, “Everything is not Connected” Keynote lecture at In/compatible systems conference, February 2, 2012. Online: https://transmediale.de/content/ keynote-everything-is-not-connected-by-graham-harman.

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In his talk, Harman outlined Marshall McLuhan’s and Martin Heidegger’s theoretical positions to support his assertion that the turn toward holistic thinking and interconnectedness has become dogma.10 Harman champions a kind of thinking that proposes a return to earlier models of material philosophy and a dramatic departure from them. More specifically, objects are distinct from each other (withdrawn) and irreducible to their constituent parts. For Harman, an atom of carbon is fundamentally different from a vulture, even though a vulture is undeniably a carbon-based lifeform. In Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO), then, “what would result from this is a world with reality outside the minds” where connections take work and involve “translations and distortions” between different objects.11 He concludes that his iconic phrase is purposefully grammatically ambiguous: not everything is connected and everything is disconnected. What is telling, Harman contends, is the connections that do occur, the configurations they enable, and the information they reveal. This approach to the study of objects has the potential to inform both the production and the analysis of contemporary art. In a 2012 film by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Raptor’s Rapture, the artists commissioned flautist Bernadette Käfer to play a 35,000 year old instrument made from the bone of a griffon vulture (Fig. 1.2). A griffon vulture sits beside the musician as she attempts to play the bone in various ways. Throughout the film’s twenty-three and a half minutes, Käfer taps on every surface and blows into every opening of the little flute, eliciting a minimalist composition of sorts. At times, the instrument sounds hoarse, strained with the effort, while at others a distinct melody emerges. The taps, silences, and incidental noises all become absorbed into the performance—an ornithological tribute to avant-garde composer John Cage’s 4’33”. The vulture, for the most part, ignores the musician. It falls asleep at a few points, and appears restless at others. At times, the creature is a stand-in for the audience, ourselves grown tired of the exhaustive instrumental experimentation. Accordingly, Raptor’s Rapture provides a visual metaphor for Harman’s idea of the withdrawn object. The viewer can 10  Harman refers to Heidegger’s analysis of tool-use, which Harman expanded at length in his book Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court, 2002) as well as Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s theory of the tetrad, in which all media enter four distinct phases of existence (enhancement, obsolescence, reversal, and retrieval). A full account of Harman’s argument is beyond the scope of this introduction, but it is fully accessible at the link on the previous note. 11  Ibid.

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Fig. 1.2  Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Raptor’s Rapture (2012). Still from digital video

interpret this film as a study in attempted communication between human, animal, and inanimate object, as well as a conversation across time. Käfer’s song, one imagines, is an echo of an earlier, prehistoric tune. It is through the materiality of the bone flute that she seeks to access this earlier world. The flautist also communicates to the vulture through another vulture, an ancestor deceased for tens of millennia. The longer one experiences the film, it becomes clear that the search for meaning is contingent upon the three featured objects—woman, bone flute, vulture. Paradoxically, that same search is thwarted by the inability of those objects to understand each other. The bone flute, while once part of a vulture, is categorically distinct from the living one captured on video. The flute, and therefore the musician, can no more speak to the vulture than it can to any other object. Harman’s OOO is one of many theories championing a return to the study of objects and, more broadly, matter. Aside from Harman, others including Timothy Morton (Realist Magic, 2013; Hyperobjects, 2013), Jane Bennett (The Enchantment of Modern Life, 2001; Vibrant Matter, 2010), Ian Bogost (Alien Phenomenology, 2012), Stacy Alaimo (Bodily Natures, 2010), Levi Bryant (Onto-Cartography, 2013) and Steven Schaviro (The Universe of Things, 2014) have written extensively on the

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autonomy of things, objects, humans and nonhumans alike. For the purposes of this study, I will use the collective term “new materialism” to refer to this overall turn. Although each approach differs in its particulars, new materialist theories as a whole “discern emergent, generative powers (or agentive capacities) even within inorganic matter, and they generally eschew the distinction between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at the ontological level.”12 Similar to the way in which the vulture, musician, and bone flute in Raptor’s Rapture are disconnected from one another, the objects of new materialist study are fundamentally disconnected from us and from each other. This is not to say that they have no interaction; rather, according to the new materialists, objects exert tremendous influence on each other and on their surroundings. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, for example, in the introduction to their anthology New Materialisms, describe “choreographies of becoming…objects forming and emerging within relational fields, bodies composing their natural environment in ways that are corporeally meaningful for them, and subjectivities being constituted as open series of capacities or potencies that emerge hazardously and ambiguously within a multitude of organic and social processes.”13 What they describe is a world in constant flux, with objects constituting their own surroundings and context. I would further contend that in a world wracked by concerns of genetic modification, human-technological hybrids, autonomous machines, and biopolitical control, thinking in terms of objects is not only expedient but increasingly necessary. This approach to the study of the material world is productively achieved within that most mysterious, alien, and transgressive of objects: the art object. In much of new materialist philosophy, interactions between objects involve the use of translation and metaphor, two strategies that visual artists are well equipped to interrogate. In Harman’s recent Art PLUS_SPI Objects, the OOO philosopher sets forth a definition of art as a “cognitive activity without being a form of knowledge,”14 later elaborating on the relationship of artwork to viewer as a “compound” which “exceeds both parts individually and it’s not exhaustively knowable by the human beholder.”15 12   Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke University Press, 2010), 9. 13  Coole and Frost, 10. 14  Graham Harman, Art PLUS_SPI Objects (Polity Press), 30. 15  Ibid., 45.

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Yet Harman’s intervention into art history is drawn into the debate surrounding literalism and theatricality—the relationship posed by Michael Fried in 1967. Harman’s focus, for the most part, is on the debates surrounding Fried’s account of Minimalism and its relationship to Greenbergian formalism, as well as the various ways that OOO intersects and complicates these established narratives of art history. My intention with this book is not to rehash those arguments. Instead, I center an art historical approach—one informed by object-oriented methodologies, but nonetheless sensitive to the social, political, and economic context of a given work. Art already accepts the inner life of objects in both an anthropocentric context and that more mysterious, withdrawn sense. In the history of art, Western and non-Western, contemporary, modern, medieval, or prehistoric, objects frequently appear inscrutable, alien, and adhering to their own internal logic. With this book, I propose a productive exchange between new materialist thought, for which the object is now of prime importance, and art history as a discipline, for which the object has always been the focus of study. Almost every modern art history course covers Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the May 1917 letter published in The Blind Man titled “The Richard Mutt Case.” The letter states that the apocryphal Richard Mutt “took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view— created a new thought for that object.”16 This statement is read in the modernist canon primarily as an assertion of authorial intent—the upside-­ down urinal is an artwork because the artist labeled it as such. Fortified by the new materialist approach to objecthood, I would contend that this curious choice of phrase could point towards something else. On the one hand, in Duchamp’s terms, the urinal is an object with a thought, perhaps a thought all its own before the apocryphal Mutt gave it a new one. OOO would argue that the urinal had that thought as the porcelain was fired, long before Duchamp placed it upside-down and signed it “R. Mutt.” But in the transition from object to art object, it lost what Harman would call its literalism. That moment of transition within the history of modern art, the origin story of the readymade (whether accurate or not), is all the same to the

16  Beatrice Wood, Henry Roche, and Marcel Duchamp, “The Richard Mutt Case,” letter to The Blind Man (May 2, 1917).

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urinal.17 Even its change of purpose—from plumbing, an object of reception and disposal, to an artwork, an object to be beheld—is considered solely in relationship to the viewing subject. If humans relate to objects (or units) through a chain of metaphors, as Ian Bogost theorizes,18 or an act of translation in Harman’s logic, then it is only the shape of the metaphor that has changed, not the object itself. It is at this point where visual art (and art history) is poised to make a contribution to new materialist philosophy. Art history sees both the object qualities of the readymade and the conceptual scaffolding that enables the idea of that urinal to change the direction of modernism altogether. The art historian considers how it is the tension between the object (the urinal) and the art object (the Fountain), not simply its co-existence in Harman’s “compound,” that is the driving force behind the use of readymades, found objects, and appropriation in the modern period through contemporary visual culture. The art object, then, is a withdrawn entity considered in tandem with a viewing subject, but also conceived of by the artist in anticipation of that subject. There are three (or more) members of that compound, their relationships forming momentary scenes of identification and withdrawal. To return to Raptor’s Rapture, in the intricate composition of flautist, vulture and bone flute, viewers familiar with the aritsts’ work will note their ongoing interest in sound and nontraditional music. Allora and Calzadilla’s work with activists in Vieques, Puerto Rico, resulted in a series of artworks, one of which (2004’s Returning a Sound) involved affixing a trumpet to the exhaust pipe of a moped as it encircled the tiny island. The strange drone of the trumpet quite literally brought sound back to the portions of Vieques that had been occupied by the U.S. Navy.19 The duo’s contribution to the 2011 Venice Biennale, Gloria, also contained a hybrid instrument of sorts—a working ATM affixed to organ pipes, leading to a series of bombastic and seemingly Biblical currency withdrawals. If I were to excavate these brief examples further, it would become clear that Allora and Calzadilla are interested in the politics of sound as they pertain to questions of neocolonialism and Western cultural hegemony. While this 17  Let’s leave aside the complication that it isn’t even the original urinal—the R.  Mutt competition entry was lost immediately, and the number of Fountain replicas seen in art institutions were all assembled after the fact. 18  Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 61–84. 19  For more on this, see Chapter Four of Ila N. Sheren, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984 (University of Texas Press, 2015).

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previous work does not overdetermine an interpretation of Raptor’s Rapture, it gives the viewer insight into the ways that the artists imbue sound with communicative capacity. Allora and Calzadilla have thus set up a multi-modal interrogation and observation between themselves, the musician, vulture, bone flute, and viewer thereby creating another object, the artwork itself. To complicate matters further, those “characters” depicted within the video are all things themselves—they exist in their own right—as well as audio-visual representations of such objects. Object, image, and sign all exist in relation to each other, but none fully encompasses the others—each lies to the viewer, hence what Surrealist René Magritte termed the “treachery” of objects. Much of digital media proceeds along these lines, engaging in subtle or overt manipulation through visual or narrative means. Allora and Calzadilla’s approach to art-making, however, asks viewers to accept the veracity of the work on some fundamental level. The relation of video or photographic representation to its subject is far from indexical, as has been shown throughout the history of photography, but on some fundamental level, the viewer still accepts the legibility of the visuals in Raptor’s Rapture. It is beyond the scope of this book to rehash the extensive arguments of representation, symbols, signs, and semiotics that art historians have been analyzing since the discipline’s inception. However, much of eco-art lies at the intersection between art and science, and in doing so, establishes a claim to visual truth-telling. “Truth” is itself a slippery concept, particularly for new materialist philosophies. Their insistence on the unknowability of discrete objects always allows for a slippage in the translation from object to viewing subject. In much of eco art, then, the withdrawn nature of the philosophical object grinds against the political realities of environmental crisis in which the data of climate change are frequently denounced, manipulated, or denied altogether in the name of partisanship. Contemporary climate discourse is engaged in proving facts or demonstrating their effects, and eco art provides critical assistance with this pressing task. Consequently, many eco artists tread a line between visual art and documentary. For example, Subhankar Banerjee, George Osodi, Edward Burtynsky, and other ecologically motivated photographers engage in this mode. Documentary photography and film have always coexisted with the concept of “reality,” so much so that the critic John Grierson, who coined the term “documentary,” believed that “in [documentary’s] use of the

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living article, there is also an opportunity to perform creative work.”20 In the case of eco-art, however, the viewer may take as a given the facts they document or present, such as the reference to Google’s carbon footprint in Moll’s Internet-based work. Often visual truth is itself stranger than fiction, and art in this case becomes a matter of framing reality rather than manipulating it. The artworks in this study slip between and perform both of these tasks. The act of framing, editing, narrating, and presenting such work for the public are conscious choices that create layers of representation and interpretation that distance the artwork (as an object) from the object to which it refers. Even without the philosophical scaffolding of new materialism, viewers already experience art objects in terms of metaphor, translation, wonder, and enchantment—terms drawn from a spectrum of object-centered theories. The audience of Raptor’s Rapture is aware that they are not watching an actual vulture, but rather a visual reproduction. The video is one of many acts of translation between the gallery-goer and the animal depicted on screen. Visual art, therefore, provides a frequent vehicle for new materialist philosophers to illustrate more abstract concepts. In one particularly evocative passage, literary theorist and OOO proponent Timothy Morton21 refers to Plato’s idea of an unseen demonic action, stating that “in an age of ecological awareness we will come again to think of art as a demonic force, carrying information from the beyond, that is, from nonhuman entities such as global warming, wind, water, sunlight, and radiation.”22 Morton asks us to extend the purview of art as a communicative medium, beyond the interpersonal or purely cultural and on to the interactions between humans and nonhuman objects. I argue, however, that visual art is not solely instrumental; instead, it can shape our understanding of human-nonhuman interactions as an active force rather than an illustration of a theoretical concept.

20   John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary” in Grierson on Documentary (University of California Press, 1966), 147. Grierson coined the term “documentary” in 1926. 21  Morton’s critique of Romanticism and the concept of nature will inform my thinking in Chap. 2, “The Boundaries of the Map.” 22  Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities Press, 2013), 22.

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Decolonizing New Materialism It is no coincidence that the surge of new materialist thought beginning in the mid-2000s coincided with an escalation in warnings of environmental crisis. In 2006, the documentary An Inconvenient Truth arrived in theaters, the culmination of a series of public presentations given by former U.S.  Vice President Al Gore. The images Gore presented in his slides showed not the typical cinematic visions of apocalyptic destruction, but a slow-creeping global cataclysm. This was death by incrementalism, replete with animations of receding glaciers, melting icebergs, and tragically stranded polar bears.23 While the environmental message had, since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, focused on the fundamental interconnectedness of living things and their ecosystems, OOO and its progeny have sought to temper this overwhelming holism. Here, chains of events are set in motion, caused by specific configurations of actors, human and nonhuman. Everything on our planet may be connected, in Carson’s sense, but some connections (not necessarily those aligned with human priorities) come to matter far more than others. The de-centering of the human amounts to a dramatic leveling of the playing field, potentially one in which the plastic bag’s view of climate change becomes just as relevant as Al Gore’s. This is a provocative thought, one that has rightly drawn criticism for its overlooking of the human populations historically excluded from power, shifting attention to the agency of nonhumans. I will address this imbalance in more detail shortly, but I do wish to foreground one of the more politically oriented proponents of new materialism: Jane Bennett. Bennett is best known for the 2010 publication of Vibrant Matter and the spread of “vital materialism” as a critical term. I am intrigued as well by her earlier elaboration of “enchantment,” however, which will figure prominently in Chap. 5, “Border Crossers.” Bennett’s ideas are quite naturally fitted to discussions of visual art, more so than many of the other new materialist theorists. Enchantment is deeply embodied, with an affective force that “entails a state of wonder, and…the temporary suspension of chronological time

23  For an analysis of why polar bears feature so prominently in climate change documentaries, see Graham Huggan, “Never-ending stories, ending narratives: Polar bears, climate change populism, and the recent history of British nature documentary film” in Affect, Space and Animals Jopi Nyman and Nora Schuurman, Eds (Routledge, 2016), 13–24.

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and bodily movement.”24 For Bennett, enchantment occurs at points of crossing, transitional moments in which the pre-established definitions of human and nonhuman begin to overlap. Rather than emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things, human and nonhuman, enchantment revels in specific configurations and intersections. Bennett points to a world in flux, one in which surprise encounters (a talking parrot, Kafka’s ape-man Rotpeter) have the potential to enable deeper alliances. Thinking in terms of cross-species hybrids, shared characteristics, and the potential energy inherent to such realignments allows one to acknowledge human agencies and causalities within a larger ecological framework without giving over to an entirely anthropocentric view. Although enchantment de-centers the human, the concept nonetheless relies upon human subjectivity for its political import. That “state of wonder” Bennett describes is enabled by the economic security and centrality of the privileged viewing subject. She addresses this charge of elitism as follows: It surely is the case that hunger and other serious deprivations are incompatible with wonder. But the claim that the capacity for wonder is restricted to the rich, learned, and leisured … is more confidently asserted than established. Even if it were true, all the more reason for privileged intellectuals to develop that capacity. For, if enchantment can foster an ethically laudable generosity of spirit, the cultivation of an eye for the wonderful becomes something like an academic duty.25

This defense of enchantment merits further consideration. It is not immediately clear that deprivation is incompatible with wonder. Even an Agamben-esque “bare life” leaves room for enchantment.26 Witness Yto 24  Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 25  Ibid., 10. 26  Agamben defines “bare life” as “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed…human life is included in the juridical order…solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed).” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 8. T.J. Demos offers an application of the term to documentary images of migrants and refugees. Such bare life is “stripped of political identity and exposed to the state’s unmediated application of power,” and “issues from more recent technologies of immobility amid military occupation and security architectures in which the displaced and excluded are denied legal rights, social protestations, and the freedom of movement.” T.J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013), xiv.

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Barrada’s scenes from Tangier in A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998–2004), in which the French-Moroccan photographer captures moments of vitality and the uncanny within this border city.27 In her photograph of Boulevard Playa in Tangier, for example, Barrada’s camera frames an echo of the strait of Gibraltar itself. The street scene sets up a divide in pavement, complete with an elaborate toy ship. Imposing narratives onto the subjects of the photograph proves impossible, as they maintain their inner lives and capacity for wonder despite the geopolitical forces that have consigned them to liminality. To argue that the condition of “bare life” or its analogues lacks joy, and therefore the ability to experience enchantment, is to invalidate the experiences of others by measuring them against a more privileged one. More troubling is Bennett’s exhortation that the elite cultivate that “ethically laudable generosity of spirit.” The path from enchantment to a recognition of the vitality inside all things— human and nonhuman—to the resulting ethical realignment is, I would argue, not a clear or direct trajectory. Such a formulation puts the fate of the many at the hands of the elite few, a dynamic much of contemporary decolonial thought seeks to upend altogether. With the 2010 publication of Vibrant Matter, Bennett moved away from enchantment’s reliance on human subjectivity, and towards an appreciation of the inner life and vitality of things. Her resulting “vital materialism” is aligned more with Harman’s OOO in terms of the unknowability of objects, but it allows for a more holistic sense of connection between them. Bennett concludes that “one moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that things, too, are vital players in the world,”28 and that recognizing the alien within ourselves “will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies.”29 Enchantment and vital materialism thus entangle observing subjects into their own analysis, binding them within a mesh of hybrids, border

27  For more on Barrada’s photographs and bare life, see Demos’s The Migrant Image, 95–102, and also my analysis of two photographs from the photographer’s Life Full of Holes series in Spotlights: Collected by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2016). 28  Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 4. Emphasis mine. 29  Ibid.

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crossers, and trans-species alignments. Recognizing the human within the nonhuman (and vice versa) enables an othering of the self. The turn to things can be terrifyingly destabilizing. In some cases, this destabilization has liberating potential, as recent theoretical developments in gender studies illustrate. One example, Jeanne Vaccaro’s 2015 article “Feelings and Fractals: Woolly Ecologies of Transgender Matter,” offers a masterful reading of Margaret and Christine Wertheim’s Crochet Coral Reef (2005–present), and interprets it as a study in transgender “becoming.”30 Specifically, for Vaccaro, the coral reef forms exhibit a hyperbolic geometry that promises “both an optic and a sensory way to look” and more subversively, invites the viewer to “feel, and inhabit dimensions that exceed the grids, rectangles, and straight networks that organize the built architecture of our lives.”31 In Vaccaro’s theorization, the materiality of the crocheted coral destabilizes perception and space. Furthermore, the very thingness of its being, lends its form to the discursive apparatus surrounding the constitution of gender. Vaccaro likens the “felt labor and traces of making and unmaking identity and the performative doing of gender becoming” to the “performative dimensions of craft” that “privilege the politics of the hand.”32 Divorced from the more obvious notions of embodiment—the only bodies in the piece are crocheted forms that stand in for coral polyps—such analyses escape being mired in circular arguments and move instead toward “theoriz[ing] the formation of life.”33 Such object-based approaches, however, are in direct conflict with the primary contribution of decolonial approaches to environmentalism: that the human species as a whole is a planetary colonizer, moving into new habitats and subjugating other lifeforms. In this sense, the new materialist turn to “things,” “objects,” and “machines” echoes the sordid history of 30  I also offer up Anne Anlin Cheng’s 2018 “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman” (Critical Inquiry 44, Spring 2018, 415–446) as a productive take on gendered inhumanisms. 31  Vaccaro, 281, paraphrasing Wertheim’s Field Guide to Hyperbolic Space. 32  Jeanne Vaccaro, “Feelings and Fractals: Woolly Ecologies of Transgender Matter” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21 (2015), 275. Vaccaro’s article comes from an entire issue of GLQ dedicated to the intersection of gender studies and the new materialisms. See Dana Luciano and Mel Y.  Chen’s introduction to that issue (Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” 182–207) for an excellent rundown of the expanded field. 33  Vaccaro, 289.

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dehumanization that enabled waves of conquest, rather than providing an escape from that past. Many approaches seek to emphasize human commonality, along the lines of the general interconnectedness Harman reacts against, but on the level of the species. Critics including literary theorist Shital Pravinchandra argue that focusing solely on questions of species survival (what she terms “species thinking”) in the face of climate change is a wishful distraction from questions regarding economic difference and the current iteration of racialized politics … More unsettlingly, however, species thinking is an unthinking imposition of an ethics of human life preservation that creates new forms of exploitation in the terrain of life itself and ultimately fails to interrogate the relationship of survivalism to our current planetary predicament.34

Human survival and advancement are not necessarily aligned with the health of the Earth. In an object-focused world in which humans and non-­ humans are de-hierarchized and causality is reduced to a series of aesthetic interactions between objects, millennia of human subjugation, whether gendered, racial, or colonial, sit uncomfortably, unacknowledged and unresolved. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty takes a similar track as Pravinchandra does, stressing that the need arises to view the human simultaneously on contradictory registers: as a geophysical force and as a political agent, as a bearer of rights and as author of actions; subject to both the stochastic forces of nature (being itself one such force collectively) and open to the contingency of individual human experience; belonging at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies.35

Balancing these “differently-scaled histories” becomes the task of movements such as climate justice, which argues for a differentiation between various populations and their relative impacts. Industrialization and modernization, long seen as the “gifts” of the West, fail to offset the environmental impacts of development. Nabil Ahmed alerts us to the contrary: “the idea that technology transfers from the West to the East, such as dead 34  Shital Pravinchandra (2016), “One Species, Same Difference?: Postcolonial Critique and the Concept of Life,” New Literary History 47:1, 45–46. 35  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,’ New Literary History, vol 43, no 1, 2012, p. 14.

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ships made of iron or the petro-capitalist technical practice of extraction, are not equitable with the flow of legal accountability for their human– nature costs.”36 Humans are a “geophysical force,” as Chakrabarty writes, but the fact remains that some humans are more forceful than others are, some regions more populated than others are, and the landscapes of global inequality rarely map smoothly onto those of ecological crisis. While this simultaneous vision is necessary in order to advance the cause of climate justice in the face of structural inequality, Chakrabarty and others continue to maintain these binary distinctions between human and nonhuman: “[t]he pressure that “the animal life” of the human species—our material and demographic flourishing (in spite of the gross inequities of human societies)—now puts on the distribution of natural, reproductive life on earth, endangering human existence in turn, is something that becomes clearer by the day.”37 This puts the eco-artist, the environmental thinker, or the proponent of climate justice in a potentially untenable position: how to avoid the dual victimization and vilification of the global poor. As Basil Sunday Nnamdi, Obari Gomba, and Frank Ugiomoh point out, empathic or affective strategies often encourage victimization: “empathy may turn out to be inadequate… Aesthetic propositions that enunciate pain, arising from disasters, are known to inspire pity—which numbs action—unless they are made intelligible in critical elocution.”38 On the other hand, critics of and within the developing world inevitably point out the strain of a burgeoning population. Describing Bangladesh, Nabil Ahmed writes, “Human population is an important actor within this natural-political assemblage, in which Bangladesh has been seen by Western neoliberal hegemony for several decades now as a Malthusian time bomb already detonated, whose shrapnel is migrant bodies.”39 In discussing population, one must acknowledge the consequences of an overburdened planet while eschewing the racial discourse implied by such a Malthusian proclamation.40  Nabil Ahmed (2013), “Entangled Earth,” Third Text 27:1, 53.  Dipesh Chakrabarty (2016), “Humanities in the Anthopocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable” New Literary History 47: 2&3, 388. 38  Basil Sunday Nnamdi, Obari Gomba, and Frank Ugiomoh (2013), “Environmental Challenges and Eco-Aesthetics in Nigeria’s Niger Delta” Third Text, 27:1, 67. 39  Ahmed, 44. 40  The per capita strain on the environment is far higher for citizens of the United States and Western Europe than it is for those in the “population bombs” of developing nations. The wealthiest ten percent of the world are responsible for almost half of total lifestyle emissions. See David Roberts “I’m an environmental journalist, but I never write about overpopulation. Here’s why” Vox, May 14, 2018. https://www.vox.com/ energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question. 36 37

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Even with the best of intentions, however, those most visibly affected by climate change are frequently portrayed as “other.” Although they are separated out as “good” or “deserving” refugees, given a seal of approval within a perverse hierarchy of need, they remain dehumanized. Displaced Maldivians, for example, hail from island locales studded with lavish resorts, surrounded by impossibly blue water, billed as honeymoon destinations, and known for being accommodating to the global elite. T.J. Demos warns that “by projecting a climate-refugee subjectivity onto [the Maldivian] population” artists working to raise awareness of the situation end up “objectifying their subjects.”41 Other accounts of rising sea levels, he argues, “accept the differential effects of climate change, determined by disparate levels of economic and technological capacity, and reproduce environmental injustice, thereby helping to naturalize it.”42 Those affected by the environmental crisis are the victims of imperceptible change, violence occurring on timescales unfamiliar to the 24-hour news cycle. Literary theorist Rob Nixon coined the term “slow violence” to describe this phenomenon and the relentless victimization of the global poor. Nixon describes “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Because it is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, “its calamitous repercussions” play out across a range of temporal scales.43 In this way, the initial violence of the colonial era circles back yet again, undetected in real time, the insidious persistence of conquest. If the Anthropocene began in 1610, once the European presence in the Americas had been solidified, rather than in 1781 with the invention of the steam engine, it becomes clear how colonization and environmental change are intimately linked.44 The subjugation of human populations 41  T.  J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), 69. 42  Ibid., 70. 43  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2013), 2. Chapter 3, Landscapes of Slow Violence, will engage with Nixon’s ideas in more depth. 44  Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, Defining the Anthopocene, Nature 519, 171–180 (12 March 2015) https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14258. The authors argue for 1610 based on an observed decline in atmospheric carbon, brought on by the population decline from 61 million to 6 million and the accompanying cessation of farming activity, forest clearing, and fire use. The authors conclude with the suggestion to name “the dip in atmospheric CO2 the ‘Orbis spike’ and the suite of changes marking 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene the ‘Orbis hypothesis’, from the Latin for world, because post-1492 humans on the two hemispheres were connected, trade became global, and some prominent social scientists refer to this time as the beginning of the modern ‘world-system.’” (175).

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parallels that of the environment. In the same way that policies and practices of extraction and disciplining wring profit from human labor, they also and at the same time enact deep and permanent change on the land. There is another, more troubling concern regarding the intersection of this turn toward objects with the decolonial project. Enchantment and vital materialism in particular owe an unstated debt to indigenous animisms.45 As a whole, the new materialisms have largely failed to acknowledge intersections with indigenous epistemologies. Jessica Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo pick apart the “new” in “new materialism” as “suggest[ing] a European developmental schema that permits the detection of non-human agencies in a contemporary period of crisis.”46 Rather than acknowledge the non-Western foundations of this thought, “indigenous intellectual and artistic activities are still relegated to deconstructing the foundational binaries of Europe, even as scholars recognize the urgent need to develop a new politics of ecology.”47 Such a twenty-first century political ecology can be found in non-Western epistemologies, but this risks both essentializing indigeneity and decontextualizing its cultural practices. Instead, Métis artist Zoe Todd writes of the need for an “effective art of the Anthropocene” that “directly engages with the structural violences of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy as they shape discourse and praxis.”48 She cites Papaschase Cree theorist Dwayne Donald’s twin ideas of “ethical relationality” and “Indigenous Métissage”—which together serve to enmesh the observer in a web of relationships, as well as potential interconnected futures. Yet I find that I cannot fully decouple the art in this book from Western art histories and Eurocentric aesthetic philosophies, seeing as the work I discuss has been created by artists operating, for better or worse, within that globalized system of interpretation and valuation. I am also wary of 45  Jessica L. Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo define animism as “a constellation of European desires that enacts the very fetishism it purports to identify.” In Jessica L. Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo (2013), “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” Third Text 27:1, 19. 46  Horton and Berlo, 18. 47  Ibid., 19–20. 48  Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” Art and the Anthropocene, 248–249.

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re-appropriating indigenous epistemologies in service of Western cultural narratives and thereby enacting another form of erasure. As much as I embrace the ethical relationality espoused in Donald’s philosophical framework, the artworks in this book intrigue me precisely because they do not achieve this. They may exist in a web of relations, but that does not comprise the entirety of their being, They are strange, marginal, withdrawn, and disjunctive, and it is for this reason that I find myself returning both to enchantment and to vital materialism, with their interplay of relationality and distinction.

Diffraction and Entanglement Can the new materialist insistence on the agency and vitality of the nonhuman account for a decolonial understanding of the multiple roles of the human? How should one approach the idea, such as in Bennett’s vital materialism, of the nonhuman within the human, collapsing any pre-­ established boundaries? Whether or not to ascertain a difference between human and nonhuman agencies is a key theoretical problem that keeps returning, again and again, to the discussion of environmental change. The pairing of human and nonhuman implies a binary, akin to that imagined separation between the natural and the artificial, wilderness and civilization, and many others that have driven environmental histories since the modern era. As I hope I have made clear, there are genuine advantages to maintaining that binary, as well as for undoing it altogether. How would it work to conceive of humans and nonhumans as both separate and interconnected, simultaneously? Would we be able to learn from the narrative of a mother bear without compromising the inherent humanity of Maldivian climate refugees? And how might this line of thinking bring decolonial theorists such as Pravinchandra and Chakrabarty into productive dialogue with, for example, Bennett’s vital materialism? In 2007, Physicist and gender theorist Karen Barad proposed a method for dealing with the competing needs of matter and discourse. They coined the term agential realism to describe this approach, which “allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming…And furthermore

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it provides an understanding of how discursive practices matter.”49 Barad’s play on the two uses of “matter” here—particle matter and political mattering—prefigures the injection of the term into twenty-first century political discourse such as “Black Lives Matter.” An agential realist understanding hinges on the scientific principle of diffraction, which “does not concern homologies but attends to specific material entanglements.”50 Rather than reflecting, as with a mirror, Barad’s method eschews the trope of analogy-­ making. Instead, diffraction is illustrated by a pattern of intersecting waves, with peaks and troughs emerging from their interaction. Their larger point is that this interaction is the apparatus through which the observer can understand the nature of the wave behavior, and that the apparatus itself has an effect on the object of study. The scientific method purports to create an objective picture of the world, while the humanities and social sciences utilize discourse to reveal its socially constructed nature. The entanglement of matter and discourse reveals such objectivity to be an illusion, and ultimately beside the point, for “[l]ike the diffraction patterns illuminating the indefinite nature of boundaries—displaying shadows in ‘light’ regions and bright spots in ‘dark’ regions—the relation of the social and the scientific is a relation of ‘exteriority within.’”51 With agential realism, then, Barad’s approach is as follows: to place the understandings that are generated from different (inter)disciplinary practices in conversation with one another….to engage aspects of each in dynamic relationality to the other, being attentive to the iterative production of boundaries, the material-discursive nature of boundary-­ drawing practices, the constitutive exclusions that are enacted, and questions of accountability and responsibility for the reconfiguring of which we are a part.52

Crucial to this method is the recognition of “dynamic relationality,” that is, that matter and discourse are mutually constitutive, and each affects the other through the act of observation.53 There is no neutral position, and 49  Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 136. 50  Ibid., 88. 51  Ibid., 93. 52  Ibid. 53  For an excellent example of the agential realist approach in action, see Annie Hill (2016), “Breast cancer’s rhetoricity: bodily border crisis and bridge to corporeal solidarity” Review of Communication 16:4, 281–298.

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neither is there the pretense of the detached, objective academic, calmly taking stock of a given set of circumstances. This is not only the most appropriate way to conceive of the environmental crisis at hand, but I would argue it is the only means to discuss a problem within which we as humans find ourselves inextricably enmeshed. In Barad’s view, such disparate theorizations become entangled with each other, pushing back and forth, drawing new boundaries, and erasing preexisting divides. The distinction between the human and the nonhuman is only a starting point. Throughout this book, that binary will be challenged, reinforced, and refined through a series of discussions about visual art and decolonial studies. It is not enough to collapse the distinctions between human and nonhuman, arguing that they are in fact one and the same. The binary persists and, I argue, is a wholly necessary means for understanding how the human can operate on different scales. On one level, “humanity” exists in the aggregate as a “geophysical force,” to borrow Chakrabarty’s term, one that has negatively altered conditions for life on Earth. Yet on another, “human” becomes a term for a collection of cells, microbes, flora, a biome in itself that seeks survival and reproduction, something alien and estranged, yet intimately familiar. The conflicting agencies of each are what come to matter in my discussion of eco art. As Barad elaborates: Difference cannot be taken for granted; it matters—indeed, it is what matters. The world is not populated with things that are more or less the same or different from one another. Relations do not follow relata, but the other way around. Matter is neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things. Matter is differentiating, and which differences come to matter, matter in the iterative production of different differences…54

It follows that looking at the objects of environmental crisis through a decolonizing lens will fundamentally change not just the dialogue around those objects but the objects themselves. Similarly, viewing a decolonized landscape with an object-oriented focus will yield a vastly different analysis. A diffractive reading of the binary will then separate the human from the nonhuman while simultaneously discovering how their points of  Barad, 137.

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intersection change the language used to describe them and how the social construction of a given nonhuman has material repercussions for its survival. Barad’s argument that matter is “differentiating” builds into the idea of agential “cuts,” or the materializing effects of discursive distinctions. Think back to the stranded CGI polar bear in An Inconvenient Truth: the figure of the bear is a cultural touchstone that has a strong affective pull on the documentary’s intended audience. In turn, it is our shared associations with the suffering bear that compel us to work to preserve its habitat and well-being over, say, that of the naked mole rat.55 Though this example may be reductive, it should give at least a sense of the intersection, how the act of observation shapes what is observed. In this book, I will develop an analysis of digital environmental art and enact the agential cuts that define what I call a border ecology.

Border Ecology With border ecology, I offer a way around one of the most pervasive contradictions surrounding environmental art. Any discussion of the environment necessarily entails non-human agencies, as well as an accounting for the human capacity for destruction. At the same time, such considerations of objects, things, and animals often develop a human-sized blind spot. The earth itself rewrites human history. Drought, floods, scarcity, and abundance all affect human migration patterns and shape cultural contact zones.56 Both the new materialist viewpoint and the decolonizing lens are necessary to conceptualize the magnitude of the current environmental crisis. New materialism grants agency to objects and forces long neglected by the anthropocentric lens, while decolonial thought is necessary for discussions of the developing world, and for reconfiguring the terms of environmental crisis in all circumstances. The study of climate change is now

55  It is quite destabilizing to have those cultural associations upended. Watching a scene of polar bears eating a whale carcass in an episode of another documentary, I experienced the most visceral repulsion. Such affect was all the more powerful because of my ingrained experience of bears as cuddly (teddy bears), graceful (the St. Louis zoo) or otherwise anthropomorphized (Coca Cola bears). Seeing the animal as a scavenger instead draws new boundaries between the socially constructed and the instinctive behavior of the bears. 56  Recall that the Syrian drought has spurred unrest against the Assad government, the rise of ISIS in the region, and the ensuing refugee crisis. See Peter H. Gleick (2014) “Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria,” Weather, Climate, and Society 6, 331–340.

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inseparable from critiques of late capitalism as well as the accompanying shift towards the rhetoric of “climate justice.” Although border ecology aims to be more than the sum of its parts, it helps to break them down and clarify how I intend their use. “Ecology” is defined as the study of the interaction between an organism and its environment. The term, coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, derives from the Greek oikos meaning house or, more liberally, environment. That interaction can take into account many actors, organic and inorganic (or some combination thereof), biotic and abiotic, and human and nonhuman alike. With the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the birth of modern environmentalism in the West, ecology began to be conceived of across disciplines as a mode of thinking as well as an area of study. My use of the term ecology is aligned with this turn towards “ecological thought.” Traditionally, ecological thinking accepts as a given the interconnectivity of all things, an idea popularized in the 1950s by Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics and systems theory. 57 However, rather than holism, which unwillingly renders such connections banal or meaningless, I heed Harman’s warning against the overuse of this concept. Contemporary ecological thought is neither fully interconnected nor fully withdrawn, but reliant upon selective interactions and chains of events. In this sense, Harman’s OOO informs the “border” in my definition of border ecology. Borders are associated with interconnection, but also mark points of difference. The term can refer to the boundary between two or more spaces, modes of being, belief systems, or other categories. Ecologically, the borders between biological communities are known as an ecotone, a space of transition that shifts with broader changes in climate. But borders are also gaps, blind spots, edges, and sites of marginality. I suggest conceiving of a given border line as a thickened space, with its own dimensions and materiality, and exerting tremendous influence on the production of art and visual culture. The center, here generalized, conceives of it as a liminal zone, the backwards, wild periphery, far from the grasp of the law, operating according to its own internal logic. This dynamic plays out in popular culture, film, television, and literature, with borders both geographic and existential. From the lawless landscapes of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) to the reality genre’s militarized Border Wars (2010–2013), and from the boundary-crossing protagonist in Lovecraft’s Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919) to Jeff Vandermeer’s environment run amok in Annihilation  I will touch on this line of thinking in Chap. 2, The Boundaries of the Map.

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(2014), the marginal and fear-inducing quality of the borderlands becomes normalized. In the logic of any given center, then, borders require maintenance, patrol, walls, fences: a militarized guard.58 The border or borderlands in this larger and looser definition, is traditionally the object of study. Decolonial theorists, specifically those aligned with the “coloniality of power” group, champion an alternate approach.59 “Border thinking,” in literary theorist Walter D. Mignolo’s formulation prioritizes the knowing nature of the object of study. The term describes an epistemological breakthrough—a call to think of border regions as themselves thinking, generators of new forms of knowledge, decoupled from the Western philosophical tradition and therefore unburdened by traditional subject-object positioning. Mignolo envisions the role of border thinking as follows: The goal is to erase the distinction between the knower and the known, between a ‘hybrid’ object (the borderland as known) and a ‘pure’ disciplinary or interdisciplinary subject (the knower), uncontaminated by the border matters he or she describes.60

In other words, Mignolo proposes changing the terms of the conversation in order to overcome the distinction between subject and object. For Mignolo, borders are of course geographic and political, but also economic, material, and intangible. Therefore, the term “border” becomes an indicator of something else, an entity that is typically thought, but must now be conceived of as active and itself thinking. I grappled with this theory in an earlier study, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics 58  In a 1968 episode of the children’s television program Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, King Friday institutes a border guard within the “land of make-believe” in order to protect the realm from “change.” If there was ever a better explanation of class protectionism in the United States, I haven’t heard it. 59  This approach rests on a critique of what is termed “Occidentalism,” thereby “understanding…the aggressive strategies used in imposing material and symbolic domination on vast territories in the name of universal reason…” and responding by establishing “the locus of enunciation as the disciplinary, geocultural, and ideological space from which discourses of powered resistance are elaborated.” Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, “Colonialism and its Replicants,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, eds. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Duke University Press, 2008), 2–3. 60  Walter D.  Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2000), 18.

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on the U.S. Frontera since 1984. There I pointed to the sub-genre of U.S.Mexico “border art” that emerged during the run-up to increased border militarization and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). That international divide gave rise to the first border art, or activist art that sought to raise awareness of the physical and social nature of the dividing line, its arbitrary nature, and the paradox between its militarized solidity and its economic porousness. The border served as an interstitial space, a neither here nor there, and a gap as much as a line. Border thinking informs my view of contemporary art; it is widely adaptable and speaks to the positioning of the artworks I discuss. The relevance of this theory for the matter at hand rests on the idea that eco-art, particularly digital eco-art, is a border genre. It is far outside the “mainstream” of contemporary art, and its lineage is that of the periphery, the transgressors, and alternative modes of art-making. In Chap. 2, “The Boundaries of the Map,” I will discuss eco-art’s history, particularly the desert Earthworks of the 1970s and the archival impulse of the net.art genre that emerged in the 1990s. In locating the origins of digital eco-art within this history, I argue that its identity is inextricably linked with that of the border or the margins. Furthermore, border thinking, as I am presenting here, is at its core an opportunity to rethink preexisting power relations. In 2014, Mignolo elaborated on his earlier theorization of border thinking, stating that [w]e, the anthropos [the other], we dwell in borders with full awareness of the power differential ‘between’ the two sides of the border, the side of the humanitas and the side of the anthropos. Border epistemology emerges from the experience, and the anger, of entanglement, border dwelling in a power differential. Briefly, border thinking requires a shift in the geography of reasoning, a geopolitical conception of knowing, understanding, and believing, a delinking from the assumption of modern and postmodern epistemology, hermeneutics and sensibility.61

Here, Mignolo underscores the relationship between border thinking and disempowerment, as well as the massive geographical shift this mode of inquiry entails. Although border thinking erases the subject/object distinction, it depends on a continued imbalance, an osmotic flow of power 61  Walter D. Mignolo, quoted in Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou, ‘An Exchange: Questions from Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou and answers from Walter Mignolo,’ in Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry, eds, Design in the Borderlands, Routledge, New York, 2014, p. 174.

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and ideas, to generate its critical heft. In the case of decolonial approaches, the ‘borders’ are precisely those points of contact between the colonizer and colonized, or, what are today termed post-industrial nations and the developing world. Mignolo argues that we, as academically trained disciplinary subjects, need to work to analyze the border according to its own internal logic. In applying Mignolo’s ideas to the U.S.-Mexico border, as I did in my earlier work, a strange thing happens: the border becomes a truly generative site, one that, in its very thickness, creates a space for alternate modes of thinking, for a dismantling of power structures. Suddenly, it is the center that is hopelessly out of touch. The border has its own codes of behavior and signs of belonging and it gives rise to new ways of conceptualizing that which lies beyond itself. For this specific case, it is the U.S. interior that constructs the image of the borderlands as lawless, crime-ridden, and in need of a wall. The border itself, its subjects, thinkers, and artists, generate a more nuanced understanding of the region, one that takes into account the deleterious effects of free trade as well as the conflicting internal logic of a decidedly hybrid community. If scholars begin to acknowledge that the border itself is a site of ‘knowing,’ that is, that the object of study itself can do the ‘thinking,’ they may be better prepared to listen to what it has to say. Mignolo’s metaphor, however, is firmly anthropocentric and ignores the nonhuman factors that shaped the history of colonialism and post-­ colonialism. In this sense, the pre-existing power dynamic between human and nonhuman actors remains firmly in place. What is lost by post-colonial studies is a full accounting of the agency of the border itself, beyond just its human inhabitants or its culture. In the case of the U.S.-Mexico border, the climate of the Sonoran desert, the polluted waterways of Baja California, and the urban fences shape the political realities of migration as well as the cultural and media forms that emerge from the region. Such an expanded conception of the border takes into account its composition as a conglomeration of humans, animals, and other living things. This activated border acquires agency not only through the actions of governmental entities, surveyors, and cartographers who establish and draw the line, but also through climatological and topographical factors. The desert crossings from Mexico to the United States are driven by economic factors and personal safety, but they are propelled by thirst, extreme heat, and the unforgiving terrain.

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I believe the overlapping points between the animist rhetoric of border thinking that I am employing here and the nonhuman turn of new materialism have a tremendous potential to generate new understandings of politically motivated eco-art. By drawing from Mignolo’s post-colonial perspective and Harman, Morton, and Bennett, I have mentioned we can see that these objects are in fact thinking. By their presence and representation they generate new ways of approaching the complexity of the environment. Here exists the key overlap, the conjunction, between border thinking and the object-based materialism of the nonhuman turn. Mignolo imparts a decolonizing sensitivity that tempers the radical de-­centering of new materialist thought, an acknowledgement that human histories of inequality and structural imbalance do, in fact, matter, and have lasting effects on the object-driven landscape presented in the images. Consideration of the nonhuman, on the other hand, gives another dimension to border thinking, expanding its reach beyond that of the human border subject, or Mignolo’s anthropos. Instead, this combined approach encompasses a rich spectrum of border dwellers. A border ecology, then, finds these new connections to make—not just between humans and nonhumans, objects and things, but also between different modes of thinking about these objects. Because border ecology looks at art from the margins, as well as the gaps, disjunctures, and interstitial spaces within any given piece, it changes the terms of the conversation. The viewer takes in the massive problems of climate change, climate justice, pollution, and lost biodiversity alike, but from these borders. As with an international border, this provides a point of entry into the larger problem, rather than being enmeshed in it from the start (an overwhelming proposition). Border ecology enables a de-centering of narratives of victimhood and objectification rather than their erasure. If we as humans locate ourselves at the borders, after all, then we can find space to question our priorities, the species-survivalist choices that brought about the “super wicked” crisis point we now inhabit. The artworks that populate this book, as well as their subjects, are all, in some sense, border denizens. While a multimedia project such as Maya Lin’s online memorial What is Missing? (which began in 2009) is ostensibly the opposite of marginal—a blue chip, prestigious venture by a legendary figure of landscape—I will argue that the piece is itself a boundary object. Furthermore, the longer one spends on this website, the nagging questions of accessibility, representation, and the very real gaps in her world map become more visible. When we as viewers try to excavate those

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gaps, to make sense of the information we don’t see, it only leads further down that metaphorical rabbit hole. The artworks I discuss in subsequent chapters all serve to populate those blank spaces, standing in for the missing parts of the memorial. A Sardinian bauxite mine, a forlorn analog clock hanging on the wall of a flooded Nigerian home, a mother grizzly bear crossing a railroad line, land use activists in Odisha, and ethereal glass cairns on the Mississippi meet us along the way. Together, they (among others) allow the enactment of a border ecology: a profoundly weird, often marginal, yet thoroughly entangled vision of an environment affected by humans but beyond their control. Gloria Anzaldúa once famously described the U.S.-Mexico border as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab firms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third…a border culture.”62 That imagery, of the scab opening and forming anew, the continual chafing of the developed world and the developing, could just as easily apply to the continued environmental crisis. Borders and their culture give way to a border ecology: spaces where human histories of exclusion commingle with exhortations toward sustainability, and where the concrete machinery of global capital bumps up against the intangibility of myth, legend, and belief. The artworks I analyze in the following chapters expose this fundamental complexity.

Eco Art The works I consider fall under the overlapping twin umbrellas of eco art and new media. In doing so, I build upon scholarship in both fields, particularly the work of Linda Weintraub, Mark Cheetham, James Nisbet, Anna Munster, Amanda Boetzkes and T.J. Demos. Defining eco art is far from straightforward, and I cite Linda Weintraub’s 2012 survey of the genre, To Life: Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet, that it is a “mission, not a style.”63 Briefly, eco art deals with the environmental crisis writ large, addressing the boundaries of art and science, utilizing the materials of life itself. Weintraub herself calls the statement “eco art is…” 62  Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands=La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999, first published 1987), 25. 63  Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), xiv.

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incomplete, acknowledging the ever-shifting nature of the work, but she does outline several attributes that apply more broadly. According to her summary, eco art is topic-driven, interconnected, dynamic, and “ecocentric,” as opposed to anthropocentric. Mark Cheetham, in Landscape into Eco Art (2018), argues for an expanded definition of the genre, including in his analysis such works as Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) and Mel Chin’s Landscape (1991) that do not explicitly address the standard issues of climate change and environmental crisis. His statement that, “eco art is not only about environmental issues or what we construe as nature. To delimit eco art within these frames is finally anti-­ ecological…”64 is a productive one, and allows the art historian a greater role to play in defining the genre. Weintraub categorically denied the landscape and Land Art genres entry into the eco art pantheon due to their anthropocentrism. In his work on borders, Cheetham offers up the metaphor of the “ecotone,” the boundary between adjacent ecosystems, as a means to theorize the contact zones between landscape and Land Art, as well as eco art’s presence within the museum or gallery space.65 Border Ecology necessarily takes up the issues of borders, margins, and peripheries, but it does so in a different manner than Cheetham’s Landscape into Eco Art. My own focus on crossings and transgressions, as well as the epistemological implications of such acts will position the concept of borders as essential to both a new materialist ontology and the social engagements of eco art. Cheetham, however, traces a necessary and important lineage through the dialectical relationship between landscape and Land Art. Unlike Kenneth Clark and W.J.T. Mitchell, who consider landscape an “exhausted” genre that lacks the potency and relevance it enjoyed in its nineteenth century heyday, Cheetham believes landscape continues to inform contemporary eco art in ways that only become visible with hindsight.66 As he contends, “landscape, land art, and eco art mutually inform one another.”67 Drawing on Cheetham’s account of landscape painting’s legacy, in Chap. 2, “The  Ibid., 170.  Ibid., 158–159. 66  W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscapes,” Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. Also see Kenneth Clark’s Landscape into Art 1st ed (J.  Murray, 1949) and Mark Cheetham, “Manipulated Landscapes” in Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the 60s (Penn State Press, 2018). 67  Mark Cheetham, Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the 60s (Penn State Press, 2018), 8. 64 65

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Boundaries of the Map,” I discuss Maya Lin’s What is Missing? Lin’s online memorial bolsters Cheetham’s claims about the mutual relationship between landscape and Land Art, especially in light of her career-long engagement with the material of the earth. Eco art, in Cheetham’s formulation, is deeply informed by landscape both as a historical genre and as a contemporary mode of art-making. The word landscape is of sixteenth century Netherlandish and North German coastal origin. According to Simon Schama, landschap signified “a unit of human occupation” or “anything that might be a pleasing object of depiction.”68 John R. Stilgoe, in his etymological analysis, points out that the English, circa 1600, used their version of the term (landskip or landskep) to designate paintings that had views across water toward land.69 This early usage, then, already connoted a border of sorts. It follows that the historical landscape genre relied on a series of borders—a horizon, after all, is a boundary between earth and sky. Borders imply crossings, of course, the movement through space and into the picture plane, as well as the journey of the eye further into space, searching for that point at which phases change: earth, water, air. As Simon Schama  writes,  the genre is believed to evince deeply held cultural beliefs, for after all it is “the product of a shared culture, it is by the same token a tradition built from a rich deposit of myths, memories, and obsessions.”70 On the other hand, Stilgoe claims, quite provocatively, that, “landscape mocks scholars” in that “landscape perception is peculiar to each inquirer.”71 In this mediation between the collective and the singular, landscape reflects shared experience, yet is also a thing to be experienced. This oscillation is equally a feature of landscape’s antithesis, Land Art. In Chap. 2, I will reflect on the use of scale in the desert Earthworks of the western United States. Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) both play with human perception of scale in a way that is impossible to convey through photographs, video, or other media. The singular, embodied experience takes over. On the other hand, each of these earthworks would lose much significance without an art historical apparatus to support it, as well as the mythmaking potential of the Southwest desert landscape. The mediation between embodied experience (matter) and discourse is what in  Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (Vintage, 1996), 10.  John R. Stilgoe, What is Landscape? (MIT Press, 2015), 4. 70  Schama, 14. 71  Stilgoe, 7. 68 69

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the end, defines Land Art, and also gestures towards Barad’s method of diffraction. Although historically, artists such as Smithson and Heizer were misinterpreted as not being concerned with environmental issues, recent scholarship argues for positioning 1960s and 70s Land Art within a broader ecological sensibility. James Nisbet, in particular, forms the basis for my thinking about the scalar qualities of Land Art. In Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, he positions these works between “whole earth” visions steeped in the visual language of the sublime and an aestheticization of systems thinking. Images of the Earth from space were said at the time to visualize the scale of ecological crisis; instead, Nisbet argues, “there is no such depth to pictures of the whole earth from space…they tend to simplify these systemic issues into an object, a flat disk. As such, this imperative to picture the earth from space is in fact tied to an older, romanticized view of environmentalism that would seek to isolate and preserve the beautiful sights of nature.”72 Taking its cues from the “whole earth” movement, land art “internalized the tension between the object quality of the earth in space photographs and its construction via systems by turning these same tensions upon the minimalist object.”73 Amanda Boetzkes’s Ethics of Earth Art tackles that period and later artworks from a different angle, claiming that “contemporary earth art exposes and redefines the social and political forces that define our environments…what is at stake in earth art is the disclosure not simply of operations of power, but also of the entwinement of human social relations with the terrestrial realm.”74 In her analysis, the “earth” in “earth art” is an elemental force, “neither just a globe…nor just a spatial container for human life, but the horizon of the world and the precondition for sensation. It is an endlessly shifting parameter that can never be reached or outstripped. Thus, earth does not stabilize the world but rather stands as an enigmatic presence that continually drives the world to reorient itself.”75 This point is an important one to reiterate, for so much of the discourse surrounding Land Art considers the earth solely as material. Boetzkes’s assessment considers the earth as an element into itself, neither 72  James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2014), 80. 73  Ibid., 86. 74  Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Kindle file. 75  Ibid.

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fully comprehensible as a whole nor able to be broken into constituent parts. In a sense, it parallels the withdrawn objects of Harman’s OOO. Overall, the work undertaken by Cheetham, Nesbit, and Boetzkes folds Land Art and earthworks into the historical trajectory of eco art, broadening the genre and locating its origins in discussions of scale, systems thinking, and power relations. Eco art ceases to be merely a set of discrete responses to an escalating problem (which no single artistic effort can resolve), and instead connects those practical concerns to broader questions concerning the nature of art and the place of humanity. Another significant contribution to eco art history is T.J. Demos’s 2016 Decolonizing Nature, which I referenced earlier, citing his critique of artist interventions on behalf of climate refugees. Focusing on a decolonial approach to climate change, Demos’s study considers the material, cultural, and economic factors that drive global inequality. Though Demos privileges the documentary, both in film and photography, over other genres, his global perspective casts a wide net outside the typical range of environmental art, and therefore considers the practices of Zapatista activists in Chiapas, Mexico, land-rights organizers in Odisha, India, and chroniclers of the Inuit in the Arctic Circle. For Demos, climate change is a result of development run amok, the consequence of an exploitative system that promises improvement for all yet propels and entrenches global inequality. Demos concludes that one of the tasks for decolonizing nature would necessarily entail “dissolving the subject-object relation in the social and natural environment” as well as “ending the conditions of mastery and appropriation that determine the connection between the two,” and finally, “stopping the multiple levels of violence that enforce these relations.”76 Social, economic, and environmental inequality are all linked; one cannot fix the state of “nature” without addressing the human landscapes encoded within. His catalogue of decolonial eco art serves to tie the genre together as a larger project, unencumbered by constraints of region or medium. Building on the aforementioned art historical approaches to eco art across media, I limit my discussion to works that represent the object of study rather than incorporate them materially. While this can be considered under the broad umbrella of new media, I prefer to think of this art as dematerialized rather than purely digital. Maya Lin’s aforementioned online memorial What is Missing? is internet-based and therefore,  Demos (2016), 203.

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continuously evolving, subject to periodic updates and contributions from a virtual public. Lin’s website qualifies as “new media” in Lev Manovich’s strictest sense, in that it follows his principles of numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.77 Other artists in my study practice different forms of digital media such as photography or video, including Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World series (2011–ongoing) and Vibha Galhotra’s Manthan (2015). In some cases, digital manipulation of an image is at the core of the piece, as with Yao Lu’s photographic series New Landscapes. Genre-bending works such as Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s Bear 71 blend CCTV footage with a web-based, interactive component. Still others, including Mitra Azar’s Scars & Borders, may be distributed as video pieces, but are produced using everyday digital consumer technologies such as personal drones. I find it important to circumscribe this study along the lines of dematerialized media, even though the impetus for much of contemporary art production and history is to blur or erase these demarcations altogether. In Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (2006) Anna Munster charts an alternate lineage for the development of digital aesthetics, eschewing the traditional discussion of the dominance of the Cartesian grid in favor of the “differential connections” associated with the baroque.78 For Munster, the Wunderkammer, the trompe l’oeil, the coexistence of science and myth, and other aspects of the baroque, produced “unassimilable” differences that slipped away from “the rhetoric of connectivity.” In other words, “gaps and remainders” sat alongside the supposed “interconnections” and testified “to the failure of a fully technologically connected and serially standardized world.” More importantly, for Munster, in the baroque “a difference always remains, and it operates to produce a gap, a leftover that is a heterogeneous element amid [the] forces of bland connectivity.”79 Munster’s insight about the unassimilable differences that digital aesthetics produce informs my insistence that the digital plays a crucial role in developing a border ecology. A border ecology zeros in on gaps, and points of difference, and treats these as entryways into larger discussions of ecological crisis, climate change, and environmentally driven social inequity. In its very encoding, digital art  See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), 27–48.  Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 6. 79  Ibid., 6–7. 77 78

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builds in the “gaps and remainders” that Munster points out amidst the blandness of smooth connectivity. Furthermore, her assessment of connectivity as “bland” prefigures Graham Harman’s later provocation that everything is not connected. The withdrawn object can be construed in terms of the material world and the digital. While new materialist theorists focus on the physical properties of matter, Munster points out that the incongruent nature of existence may be heightened through digital technologies. Munster also cautions us to avoid the binary of material and digital, for new media technologies are instead “concrete actualizations of the virtual capacities of both the digital and of human bodies.”80 The digital works in tandem with the physical, rather than an escape from or antithetical to it. At the same time, digital media exhibit a complex relationship to human communication. Recalling the discussion of accessibility at the start of this introduction, it becomes clear that Joanna Moll’s online installation is decidedly not an argument for open communication; rather, it reminds the site visitor that every online action comes with a carbon cost. For Munster, digital media technologies alter the very nature of communication as they provide new pathways through space and time, allowing different temporalities to enfold on each other, generating productive juxtapositions and reconfiguring old media technologies in the process.81 These alterations reconfigure the material and digital in terms of each other, precluding the very possibility of the binary. In these terms, then, dematerialization is a process rather than an outcome. Digital art can play an important oppositional role within the broader realm of media, media studies, and digital communication. To better understand some of its potential contrarian practices it is useful to consider Matthew Fuller’s and Andrew Goffey’s description of “evil media” and its production of “grayness.”82 For Fuller and Goffey, gray media is the coding that allows postindustrial life to run smoothly by minimizing “perceptual and affective contrast” thereby “yielding the low intensity presence of uniformity.”83 The interface of such gray media obscures the machinations  Ibid., 17.  I would contend that digital art does the same for other artistic media: the existence of Deforest exerts backwards pressure on Dion’s Neukom Vivarium (2006), Natalie Jeremijenko’s One Tree (1999), John Muir’s own protected redwood glades, or even any number of Romantic tree-adorned landscapes. 82  Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (MIT Press, 2012), 11. 83  Ibid., 14. 80 81

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of what Fuller and Goffey term the “astute media operative,” one whose proficiency far exceeds that of the everyday user. In the most extreme of cases, such an operative can take advantage of grayness to gain a degree of control over others.84 Though the artists and artworks that I address in this book exist within, and are supported by, the same networks and machinery that creates this grayness, they also attempt to push back against and navigate this fraught, yet banal territory of screens and searches, interactivity and receptivity. Digital eco art, in its expanded definition, disrupts and draws attention to the smooth connective tissue of gray digital life. Although an artwork such as Moll’s Deforest functions on the same platform that potentially “evil media,” like Google Earth, Maps, and Street View uses, it calls attention to the link between Internet searches and carbon usage, and translates this data for the user into material terms.85 In this way, Moll’s piece challenges the perception of Google as being “gray,” “bland,” or, to paraphrase the search giant’s first slogan, of doing no evil.86 Critical media art asks viewers to examine the intentions behind their own actions online, and challenges them not to take the smooth interface of the contemporary Internet for granted. Moll’s ever-propagating digital forest points to the “failure” and the “gaps” of an otherwise seamless connectivity. Moll’s trees and their analogues in the physical world remind online users that the system is in fact replete with misalignments, byproducts, and waste. It shatters the myth of a purely digital interaction that leaves no trace outside of its computational circuits. Following Harman, Moll’s trees demonstrate that everything is not connected, and it is these disconnects that begin to address the ecological crisis.

84  For a concrete, if extreme, example, see Richard Grusin’s analysis of Donald Trump and his “colonization” of Twitter: Richard Grusin (2017), “Donald Trump’s Evil Mediation,” Theory and Event 20 (1): 86–99. 85  I have written about Google Earth, Maps, and Street View as evil media, elsewhere. See Ila Nicole Sheren (2018) Standardization, Censorship, Systems, Surveillance: Artist Perambulations Through Google Earth, GeoHumanities, https://doi.org/10.108 0/2373566X.2018.1472025. 86  Google’s initial corporate slogan was “Don’t be evil.” In 2015, the company rebranded itself as Alphabet and changed its slogan to the Spike-Lee-esque “Do the Right Thing.”

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Chapter Overview Border Ecology is structured in a way that allows me to consider separately the limitations of new materialist and decolonial thinking before developing the agential realist approach that I am describing as border ecology. Chapter 2, “The Boundaries of the Map,” discusses Maya Lin’s ongoing and perpetually shifting online memorial, What is Missing?.87 For Lin’s website, the escalating loss of biodiversity takes visual form through the recollections of site visitors, as well as literary and historical sources. The result is a continuously updating catalogue of the flora, fauna, and ecosystems lost to human intervention. Although anyone can visit the site and upload a memory, What is Missing? is still a highly curated work of visual art. I will argue that the site functions as a boundary object, a point of entry into larger discussions of the history of Land Art, memory and the archive, Internet art, and online activism or “clicktivism.” As such, What is Missing? makes a fitting start to this text. The map is uneven, and filled with inconsistencies, silences, and gaps. This is both intentional and an oversight, a point I will elaborate further in the chapters to come. Border ecology asks us to excavate those gaps in order to understand the significance of the margins, liminal regions, and interstitial spaces. In Chap. 3, “Landscapes of Slow Violence,” I open up the discussion of slow violence first theorized by Nixon and address the work of Chinese photographers Yao Lu and Jiang Pengyi. In different ways, Yao and Jiang use digital manipulation to reveal the impact of urbanization and industrial development on China’s landscape. Borrowing from Nixon’s work, in this chapter I address the challenges of representing “slow violence.” I draw connections between their work and others, such as Sardinian videographer Mitra Azar and South African photographer Gideon Mendel who also, to continue the metaphor of Lin’s map, represent the overlooked areas of her flattened earth. In Mendel’s case, his series Drowning World can be said to alleviate postcolonial difference through an 87  The dates on What is Missing? are not straightforward. The project began in 2009 as a website and installation at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The following year it was repackaged as a multimedia (DVD) set. Its current version is a redesign from Earth Day of 2015. Due to the crowdsourced nature of the site, new memories and events are uploaded frequently, causing the map to change with every visit. For the purposes of this study, I will refer to the dates of What is Missing? as 2009–ongoing. For more on the DVD set, see Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press, 2012), 230–236.

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object-centered approach. In fact, one could say that the flooded objects and spaces he depicts stand as surrogates for the humans that owned and made them. If Mendel’s photography searches for a leveling effect between people worldwide (and finds it in the floodwaters), it does so at the expense of local knowledges. One evocative photograph of his from North India, which I will delve into in detail, reveals a key misunderstanding about the nature of floods, drought, and the cycles of life. To rectify this, Chap. 4, “Entanglements,” follows Barad’s theory of diffraction to read the material and social histories of a given artwork through each other rather than as opposed. Taking a geographical cue from Mendel’s photograph, I undertake an extended analysis of Indian artist Vibha Galhotra’s 2015 video short Manthan, in which she likens the present-day contamination of the Yamuna River in Delhi to an episode from Hindu mythology. This piece, with its deceptive simplicity, brings together the sacred and the profane and asks viewers to contend with the environmental consequences of this entanglement. In doing so, I draw connections with Amar Kanwar’s Scene of Crime (2011), shown as part of his multimedia installation The Sovereign Forest (2012). Both pieces revel in their material and conceptual complexity, and I argue that their decolonial and ecological critiques are inseparable and mutually constitutive. With Barad as guide, these works champion a border ecology. Finally, Chap. 5, “Border Crossers,” brings together the various threads outlined above, merging landscape and objects, matter and discourse, the provocations of decolonial thought and the promise of new materialism. I bring this to bear on two vastly different works: Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan’s multimedia Watershed Cairns (2011–ongoing) and Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s 2012 interactive documentary Bear 71. The ongoing Cairns constitutes a mapping of the Mississippi River watershed, beginning in the St. Louis metro area and moving on to chart the Upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Reuter and Rowan photograph these glass objects in situ, and then upload the coordinates to an online map. In doing so, they encourage exploration of the region, but more significantly, chart a border landscape, with the river’s flow marking out territories of inequality. This may seem an odd pairing with Bear 71: the documentary narrates the life and death of a mother bear in Alberta’s Banff National Park along with her entanglements with the human world. The online interface asks viewers to join the collective, But the bear and the cairns are

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both border crossers; their journeys bridge divides both social and ecological. If the geographical borders of the Earth are where populations intersect, new vocabularies are formed, and cultures are shared, then a border ecology can do the same to address environmental crisis. The question that drove my initial inquiry into digital art, the carbon expenditure that powers Deforest, as well as What is Missing?, Bear 71, Watershed Cairns, and all of the artworks I will discuss, is no longer the pertinent one. A full accounting, as in Moll’s website, is only one side of the story. What these artworks actually do is help to shape the ways that humans conceive of life on Earth. They encourage considerations of the previously overlooked, and allow us to investigate different timescales and points of view. Eco art is exciting primarily because it navigates the realms of aesthetics, science, and politics; it frames existential crises and in some cases offers solutions. Often overlooked is the potential of the genre to address histories of human inequality as well as the human/nonhuman divide. As I have argued thus far, and will continue in the chapters to come, such interventions are not a mere side effect of eco art history. Rather, the reconciliation of human priorities about nature with intra-human dynamics is essential to the political task at hand.

CHAPTER 2

The Boundaries of the Map

Maya Lin’s online memorial What is Missing? (2009–present) is a curious entry within the canon of digital eco-art. At its surface, the piece adheres to the explicit goals of environmental activism and includes a call to action, all the while asserting its status as a work of art. Linda Weintraub included the 2009 version in her comprehensive survey To Life: Eco-Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (2012), calling the piece “formidable.”1 Curator Dina Deitsch wrote that it “challenges the very idea of a memorial or monument as a singular or static entity.”2 Lin herself has referred to What is Missing? as definitive, calling it her “last memorial,” but one that “reinvents” itself: “I love rethinking what things are, changing assumptions— so what if a monument, which we normally think of as being singular and static, can exist in many places simultaneously?”3 What is Missing? combines reflections on lost biodiversity with multimedia vignettes, all set against the backdrop of the world map. The memorial takes advantage of the interactive qualities of the Internet in order to populate this map with historical data and personal, user-generated anecdotes. Site visitors 1  Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 231. 2  Dina Deitsch, “Maya Lin’s Perpetual Landscapes and Storm King Wavefield,” Woman’s Art Journal 30 (Spring/Summer 2009), 9. 3  Maya Lin, quoted in Diane Toomey, “Maya Lin’s Memorial to Vanishing Nature” Yale Environment 360, June 25, 2012. Online. http://e360.yale.edu/features/ maya_lin_a_memorial_to_a_vanishing_natural_world.

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navigate these recollections through an interface of colored dots indicating approximate locations on the map, or, in “timeline” mode, on a linear chart covering recorded history. At its best, What is Missing? plunges the viewer into a schematic, virtual world, one that encourages visitors to cast aside preconceived hierarchies of human and non-human. Lin’s work, whether What is Missing?, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) or the Wavefield at the Storm King Art Center (2007–2008), has the power to draw connections across media, disciplines, space and time. I argue that the online memorial serves as a focal point for larger discussions of Land and Earth Art and their place within eco-art history, 1960s-era philosophical musings about the concept of nature and its increasing reliance upon the human, and the digital archive and its mapping of human experience. In addition, the piece raises questions about the status of online activism and the repercussions a given action in cyberspace may have on the material world. For the purposes of this study, it also serves as a branching point to search elsewhere for answers—to fill the gaps within the map and move toward a border ecology, as I do in the remainder of this book. What is Missing? brings together a number of entangled histories. In doing so, it serves as a boundary object of the kind described by Fuller and Goffey in Evil Media. Such objects offer an insight into different worlds or modes of being, giving “material shape to ambiguity… Never quite accomplishing the mental standardization of a meeting of the minds, but achieving only resonances, coordination, and points and counterpoints of contact between groups…”4 Lin’s piece straddles boundaries between differing artistic genres and movements, past and present. It is informed by the eco-social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, whose thought manifested in anti-establishment Land Art and Earthworks, but also in a strain of techno-utopianism espoused by the New Communalists and the Whole Earth network. The latter would form the basis for the 1990s net. art generation and its emphasis on community building through online connectivity. The database and the archive, along with early net.art’s insistence on categorizing and digitizing shared histories, also have tremendous influence on social projects such as What is Missing?. For example, the impulse to catalogue and record the memories of individual visitors to the site has its origins in the earliest net.art projects including Antoni Muntadas’s File Room (1994). The slick, seamless interface of 4

 Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2012), 8.

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Lin’s memorial builds on a traditional structure—a filing system for reminiscences of lost biodiversity. What is Missing? mines this shifting territory and reveals gaps, missing links, and inequalities across the globe. While not an intentional meta-commentary on the nature of inequality, it becomes clear that the silences of Lin’s world map speak far louder than the textual components. In this chapter, I argue that visual art, specifically digital and Internet-­ based work, is uniquely positioned to engage with object-oriented philosophies, bringing them into a more productive dialogue with the history of art. In 2007, Timothy Morton asked what would happen if we were to envision an ecology without nature. That is, without a reliance on the trope of “nature” and its imagined distance from human “culture,” the classic binary I discussed in the introduction.5 This new ecology would shed the legacy of Western Romanticism, which elided the commodification of the laboring class and the colonial subject in favor of the blank slate of untouched nature. For example, a given Romantic landscape painting, such as Samuel Finley Breese’s 1835 depiction of Niagara Falls (Fig. 2.1), distances the viewer from the materiality of the nonhuman environment, all the while reinforcing hierarchies of color and class. In Breese’s scene, the artist includes a few unidentified Native Americans against the backdrop of a waterfall. Their identification with the wild, untouched Niagara underscores their separation from white “civilization.” In other words, they serve as one feature of the landscape among many. The prelapsarian vista imagined by Breese deliberately glosses over the influence of European and Anglo-American settlers. As early as 1801, Niagara had become known as a honeymoon site,6 in 1818, Canadians constructed the first stairway behind the Falls, and by 1820 the first ferry service began.7 Breese’s sublime landscape of a stormy sky and thunderous Falls is not a mimetic representation of a historical moment. Following Morton’s logic, Romantic images such as Breese’s obscure and eventually replace the complex entanglements that exist between human and nonhuman actors. The fantasy of an untouched state of “nature” perpetuates the kind of

5  Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 6  Spurred in part by the “celebrity” honeymoons of Aaron Burr’s daughter Theodosia, and possibly Napoleon’s brother, Jerome. 7  http://nyfalls.com/niagara-falls/history/#1800.

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Fig. 2.1  Samuel Finley Breese, Niagara Falls from Table Rock (1835). Oil on canvas

destructive species survivalist thinking that post-colonial theorists, including Shital Pravinchandra (quoted in the introduction), have criticized.8 Morton follows a long line of thinkers who warned against the artificial separation between human and “nature.” In 1989 Felix Guattari wrote, “in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally.’”9 For Guattari these “three ecologies” were fully interlinked and interdependent. One cannot solve a crisis in the environment, for example, without understanding its reach into individual subjectivity and the larger capitalist systems already in place. That same year, in 8  Shital Pravinchandra (2016), “One Species, Same Difference?: Postcolonial Critique and the Concept of Life,” New Literary History 47:1, 45–46. 9  Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 1st edition. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2008. 43.

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his now classic The End of Nature (1989), Bill McKibben observed that “nature” had already been destroyed, and that human intervention had affected everything on the planet. In his view, “the end of nature” described the end of “a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it.”10 The protection and preservation of an aesthetic of “nature,” he argued, was an obstacle to environmental thinking.11 Returning to Guattari, we see the following overlap between his philosophy of interlinkage and McKibben’s pronouncement. As McKibben writes, environmental crises necessitate not only a human-generated solution, but also an ongoing maintenance, so that “natural equilibriums will be increasingly reliant upon human intervention, and a time will come when vast programs will need to be set up.”12 Guattari and McKibben’s writings of the late-1980s foreshadow the more techno-centric climate solutions of the late 2010s, such as the use of wind turbines to enhance Arctic sea ice formation by recirculating ocean water.13 Even with the popularity of McKibben’s writings and the scholarly influence of Guattari, the myth of a completely untouched “nature” persisted, due to the roots of modern ecological thought. In such highly influential texts as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and David Brower and Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), the authors set humans as the antagonists in a conflict against an entirely separate “nature.” Whether  implicating the toxins leached out by modern industry or the byproducts of an exploding global population, these texts placed the blame, and therefore the onus of finding a solution, on humans themselves. Literary critic Lawrence Buell remarked in 1995 that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and other ecological texts bring out “more strikingly the pastoral logic that undergirds environmental apocalypse, which rests on the appeal to the moral superiority of an antecedent state of existence when humankind was not at war with nature…”14 In other words, the fallacy of Silent Spring and similar works that followed it is this appeal to a nonexistent “antecedent state” or moment of equilibrium. This  Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Anchor Press, 1989), 7.  Steven Vogel, “Why Nature Has No Place in Environmental Philosophy,” The Ideal of Nature: Debates about Biotechnology and the Environment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 86. 12  Guattari, 66. 13  Desch, S. J., et. al., “Arctic ice management.” Earth’s Future 5 (2017): 107–127. 14  Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 300. 10 11

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particular strain of 1960s ecological thought coincided with a resurgence in Romantic idealizations of a “whole earth.” Spurred by NASA’s release of images showing the entire planet floating in the void of space in 1968 and 1969, ecologists intensified the rhetoric of fragility and insignificance amidst a vast universe. Romantic landscapes have also had an integral role in the ongoing construction of U.S. national identity. These have shifted from nineteenth-­ century images of the Western frontier to modern photographs of the “final frontier” of the space age. In After Nature (2015), the legal historian Jedediah Purdy describes the often-conflicted relationship between Euro-Americans and the frontier. For white settlers, writes Purdy, the “engine” of social change “was the land itself” as “graduations of inequality buckled and broke because open land was available beyond the pale of the hierarchical settlements.”15 Additionally, if the continent was perceived to be wholly unoccupied prior to European arrival, this could mitigate the guilt for displacing its original inhabitants and push the rhetoric of open space as fostering democracy and order. For mid-nineteenth century Americans, the sheer scale of the West, its soaring pines, jagged mountains, and other iconic vistas worked to reify that image of the land as untouched and pristine. Such sublimity, however, was a reminder “that nature is not designed for human purposes: [these scenes] were vast, intimidating, inhospitable; often impossible to compass in one person’s gaze, they overwhelmed the eye.”16 The Romantic sublime was both a secular and spiritual experience. It coincided with the religious view of nature as closer to God—an experience of communion surpassing that contained within Europe’s grandest cathedrals. Entwined with these spiritual aspects came moral ones—Americans had an obligation to care for and preserve these untouched patches of land. “Untouched,” however, was a relative term. In this sense, then, the supposed moral duty to the land allowed for the erasure of the histories of indigenous people. When evidence of Native American culture could not be ignored, it was deflected and absorbed into counter narratives of mythical “mound builders.”17 As environmental philosopher John O’Neill argues, “the present-day appeal 15  Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 68. 16  Ibid., 102. 17  See Angela Miller, “The Soil of an Unknown America: New World Lost Empires and the Debate over Cultural Origins” in American Art Summer/Fall 1994: 9–27.

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to wilderness bypasses the darker sides of American national history.”18 One can place within this philosophical lineage the establishment of the U.S. National Parks, their subsequent canonization by filmmakers such as documentarian Ken Burns and their enshrinement in the glossy pages of National Geographic.19 The commodification of Romantic vistas proved that even sublime nature was conquerable, at least by an intrepid new nation. This construct pitted humankind, represented by a uniquely American ingenuity, against the power of “nature.” Culturally, the United States absorbed the Western Romantic landscape into its mythical national character. The Romantic undercurrents of the 1960s U.S. ecological movement were a logical extension of those which had shaped the nation. Purdy’s history of U.S. land policy brings out some of the nuance lacking in Morton’s argument, delving into the complicated and often contradictory origins of preservationist orthodoxy exemplified by the Sierra Club and the naturalist John Muir. As he writes, “Romantic environmentalism has followed Thoreau in treating changed consciousness as an individual goal, a matter of improving the personal relationship with nature. It has tended to treat politics and social order as a web of distractions.”20 Romantic reverence for the wilderness “paradoxically dissolved the natural world, idealizing nature to the point of obscuring much of its reality.”21 The Sierra Club’s shift from personal liberation to agitating for legislative action marked a simultaneous distancing of the human from untouched nature along with a commitment of human intervention to preserve it, acknowledging that “conscience and aesthetic openness…are ecological products, and also social products.”22 In this narrative, Thoreau’s ­wanderings, John Muir’s “secular cathedrals,” and the Wilderness Society’s isolation chart a branching path, one without a clearly defined destination. Romanticism doesn’t necessarily distance the human from a socially constructed “nature,” but instead forges a false affinity.

18  John O’Neill, “Wilderness, Cultivation, and Appropriation” in Humans in the Land: The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Cultural Landscape, ed Sven Arntzen and Emily Brady (Fagbokforlaget Press, 2008), 28. 19  This phenomenon is ongoing, take a recent example: the featured article from National Geographic’s October 2016 issue on National Parks: “Back to Nature: Unplugging the Selfie Generation.” 20  Purdy, 122. 21  Ibid., 123. 22  Ibid., 146.

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In his call to reject the legacy of Romantic notions of what constitutes “nature,” Morton elides the fact that visual art has already contended with this past. Artists such as Lin have used the productive tension generated by an artificial separation from the natural and proposed a radical reintegration with the physical. The discussion of Land Art later in this chapter will make this clear, but I will argue that this holds true even more so for digital art. Lin’s What is Missing?, among others, rewrites and remixes the past and engages with the historical separation of human and nonhuman. It re-orients the viewer to the generative potential of the environment. In doing so, Lin’s memorial hews to Anna Munster’s theorization of the digital as a folded space that marks connections between different temporalities and “expands our conceptual understanding and aesthetic experience of different kinds of time.”23 It is not enough to drop “nature” from the discussion of environmental crisis, but rather, one must understand how historical constructs of human/nature separation continue to inform how we navigate, respond to, and preserve the environment.

What is Missing? as an Interactive Digital Experience The research and writing of this book has spanned the period of 2014 through late 2019. During this period, What is Missing? underwent a number of aesthetic and conceptual overhauls, and it continued to do so after my own analysis of the project concluded. As such, I will be discussing two distinct versions of the piece, with the caveat that it no longer appears online in the same form as in my description. Each version serves as an encapsulation of certain ideas about the political urgency of environmental crisis, as well as the technological capabilities of its time. For the initial version of the What is Missing? website, which existed from 2007 through Earth Day 2015, a brief introductory animation greeted the viewer. This introduction capitalized on the affective potential of sound and memory and its pre-established association with loss. Beginning with a black screen, an array of dots would materialize and morph into silhouettes of endangered or threatened species—unnamed birds, frogs, and plants. The silhouettes were general; each could represent one particular species or many. Sound clips, such as the calls of birds or the croaks of a frog, permeated the background. The use of a primarily auditory 23  Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 5.

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introduction for a memorial to lost biodiversity primes viewers to search for their own recollections. In doing so, What is Missing?, whether intentionally or not, echoes Morton’s claim that sonic history “is actually the symptom of a radical loss of place…it aestheticizes place.”24 This observation is borne out across a broad spectrum of eco-critical sound art. From large-scale sound repositories, such as the Australian-led Biosphere Soundscapes Project (launched 2012), which catalogues recordings of endangered environments, to the poetics of Paul Walde’s performance and video installation Requiem for a Glacier (2013), sound enables an encoding of missing life and precarious landscapes into an aesthetic, embodied experience. While Morton’s assessment of sonic history hinges on nostalgia, geographer Anja Kanngieser argues for a less anthropocentric approach. She writes that sound, “is about becoming aware of registers that are unfamiliar, inaccessible, and maybe even monstrous; registers that are wholly indifferent to the play of human drama. Sound is not only of the human, it undermines human exceptionalism…”25 Sound, in this context, can act as a leveling device that challenges anthropocentric hierarchies of human and the nonhuman. The auditory component of Lin’s piece, however, is guilty of what Kanngieser criticizes of more “passive” nature recordings. She argues that this kind of recording, indicative of a desirable “ambience,” erases the conditions of its own production through editing.26 In doing so, such recordings strip the environment of context, presenting it as unmediated. The sonic vignettes in Lin’s introductory animation act in this manner, compelling the viewer to imagine the birds, amphibians, and mammals depicted as entirely separate from human contact. The sounds register as generic, rather than the particularity of a given species. Perhaps the sound recordings, at least to the untrained ear, complement the visuals by serving as auditory silhouettes. They represent the idea of a frog, rather than a single endangered species, mirroring the visual strategy of generic  Morton 2007, 95.  Anja Kanngieser, “Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Five Propositions for Sound,” GeoHumanities (September 2015), 2. Kanngieser adds that the act of translation is itself a way to redistribute power, “Recognition of the power endemic to knowledge production and its forms of legitimation, especially at this time of asymmetrical global ecological crisis, underscores this appeal. It is here that listening, actually and quite literally listening and hearing, become central practices” (Kanngieser, 3). 26  Anja Kanngieser, “Listening to the Anthropocene: Sound and Ecological Crisis,” talk given at the University of Minnesota Department of Geography, March 24, 2016. 24 25

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animal and plant shapes. As a whole, then, the introductory animation and audio track wrestle with the question of how to position the human as central to the issue at hand while recognizing the primacy of each lost species in its own right. When the dots finally settle in animated introduction, they fall into place against a standard Mercator projection world map with the continents in gray against a darker background. Across the map, there are different colored dots each representing either individual recollections, or information from historical sources. Some of the information has been uploaded by users, as befits the crowdsourced nature of the piece. The site allows visitors to interact with it either by geographical area (the default setting) or by historical era. In the geographical setting, each dot corresponds to the location of a given memory or multimedia clip. These are further distinguished by different colors to indicate different media or content (i.e. video, photograph, uploaded memory, or historical quotation) Clicking any dot zooms the viewer into the region, revealing a photograph or text of its corresponding memory or, in the case of the multimedia clip, giving the full screen over to its presentation. Exiting the vignette zooms the viewer back out again to the global map. This motion, zooming in and out, back and forth, establishes a rhythm to the piece and allows for a sense of immersion. The mechanics of the map are thus similar to those of Google Earth or any number of geolocation services. The viewer is immediately familiar with this motion, rendering the site easy to navigate, even upon first glance. The minimal aesthetic of Lin’s piece, however, runs contrary to the naturalism of those corporate sites, and upends viewers’ expectations of the “value” of visual information. A recent analysis of the aesthetics of Google Earth focused on the notion of “value” within the computer-­ generated landscape. The study concluded that “[t]he leap to 3D landscape information, combined with the use of ‘realistic’ levels of detail and the free choice of the user to select the viewed location” raised some troubling questions. By transforming what was map data into “recognizable local perspective views” which were more meaningful to visitors, it inevitably turned these views into “value-laden” information.27 Value, as defined by this study, is a function of mimetic realism. In other words, a 27  R.J. Sheppard and Petr Cizek, “The ethics of Google Earth: Crossing thresholds from spatial data to landscape visualization.” Journal of Environmental Management 90 (2009): 2108.

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rendering that reflects what viewers observe of the world will have far more “value” to them than one that is schematic. Though the study’s conclusion may hold true, by visually decluttering the scene for users, Lin organizes space according to a different hierarchy based on information (recollections, media clips), rather than topographical features. In this way, the minimal aesthetic of What is Missing? refuses the easy, value-laden associations that the satellite imagery found in Google Earth would allow the viewer to make. Lin’s effort to declutter the map for viewers is furthered by a second option that allows What is Missing? to be experienced chronologically. At the lower right corner of the website, a clock icon allows viewers to switch to “timeline” mode. In a smooth animation, the dots rearrange themselves accordingly, moving from their assigned geographic location on the map to their indicated timeframe on the line. Aligned in vertical stacks, the dots indicate the number of records present on the map per year, century, or epoch. Toggling from map to timeline view establishes a smooth interconnectivity, carried out through the motion of the dots. The different layouts allow the viewer to engage with the entirety of recorded history across the extent of the earth. In doing so, What is Missing? expands the scale of the ecological crisis beyond that of colonization and industrialization, two touchpoints for the Anthropocene, With this feature, What is Missing? recalls Rachel Carson’s line from Silent Spring, that “given time—time not in years but in millennia—life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.”28 Lin’s timeline, with its ever-increasing stacks of colored dots, illustrates this idea that “there is no time” for life to adjust. If Carson’s words seem eerily prescient, it may be because of recent theorizations of the Anthropocene and the corresponding “Great Acceleration.”29 The increase in incidents catalogued by Lin’s memorial in “timeline” view dramatizes for viewers the moment the long history of geological time crashed into the epoch marked by human involvement. Through the persistent animation of the dots, What is Missing? reminds viewers that each one is rooted in individual recollection, but is also part 28  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, anniversary edition (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 6. 29  The “Great Acceleration” is generally agreed to have begun in the second half of the twentieth century and correlates to the testing and deployment of nuclear weapons. While it reflects the rate of change in human society and technological development as a whole, the period corresponds to a dramatic increase in the visible changes on the planet.

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of that swarming collective from the introductory animation. One such media clip, labeled “The Abundance of Bison,” presents the US Great Plains and the bison that once overpopulated the region. Scanning the map over North and South Dakota, one encounters a gray dot that opens up a media vignette, a historical black and white photograph that fades slowly into and out of focus as a lengthy quotation appears. The image is of man posing for scale, dwarfed by a massive pile of bison skulls. The quotation, from conservationist and zoologist William T. Hornaday, describes the enormity (and nuisance) of the bison herds that once stopped traffic.30 The gradual blurring and fading of the image represents how these animals have, for the most part, faded into memory. Hornaday’s words, then, form the basis of this recollection. Even when drawing from historical sources, Lin’s memorial insists on a first-person account of loss. A persistent theme of What is Missing? is the fragility of memory, its mutability, and the need to re-inscribe it continually. Accordingly, Lin’s memorial addresses both the presence and absence of memories, multiplied across time and space, sequential and simultaneous. This simultaneity appears at first to contrast with Lin’s earlier, physically grounded monuments and memorials, including her Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), Civil Rights Memorial (1989), and the Women’s Table at Yale University (1993). According to Daniel Abramson, these three structures are presented as “pure chronology,”31 and “are just as concerned with graphically presenting history as a chronological time line as they are with composing abstract relations of space and mass.”32 Abramson further argues that the timeline was an “ideological tool par excellence of American educational culture.” It made “history ideologically ‘accessible,’ orderly, and objective, continuous, causal, and progressive,” neatly combining the 30  Hornaday’s full quote is as follows: “Between the Rocky Mountains and the states lying along the Missippi [sic] River on the west from Minnesota to Louisiana, the whole country was one vast buffalo range inhabited by millions of buffaloes. One could fill a volume with the records of plainsmen and pioneers who penetrated or crossed that vast region between 1800 and 1870, and were in turn surprised, astounded, and frequently dismayed by the tens of thousands of buffaloes they observed, avoided, or escaped from. They lived and moved as no other quadrupeds ever have, in great multitudes like grand armies in review, covering scores of square miles at once. They were so numerous they frequently stopped boats in the rivers, threatened to overwhelm travelers on the plains, and in later years derailed locomotives and cars…” (What is Missing? “The Abundance of Bison”). 31  Ibid., 679. 32  Daniel Abramson, “Maya Lin and the 1960s: Monuments, Time Lines, and Minimalism,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Summer 1996), 696.

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“political and the social, of ‘major events’ and ‘daily life.’”33 Lin’s liberation from physical constraints in the shift from physical to digital memorial may have allowed a similar liberation from the sequentiality of the timeline. By making the timeline in What is Missing? secondary to the geographical arrangement that greets the viewer upon entry, Lin privileges a spatial visualization of the environmental crisis, without foregoing the chronological mode entirely In doing so, she acknowledges the role of such a timeline in the inscription and re-inscription of collective memory. Despite Lin’s efforts to provide a visually compelling representation of the environmental crisis, What is Missing? lacks a deeper level of critique. Its focus on lost biodiversity does not address the socially complex reality of climate change, specifically its unequal effects on different regions of the globe. The website’s minimal aesthetic, while recalling Lin’s sculptural and landscape work, omits the human landscape embedded within the map. Lin’s crowdsourcing, which invites participation from people across the globe, is woefully incomplete and creates an uneven distribution of recollections and anecdotes. Though unintentional, this incompleteness charts the larger social and geographic inequality that Lin never addresses directly. For example, some regions of the map, including the Middle East, West Africa, and South America, are dramatically underrepresented. Though these omissions yield no easy explanations, they point to a problem. Take the case of Puerto Rico. Though there are a few posts from the island, their paucity raises questions about a lack of awareness or indifference from the public—whether this is due to a dearth of extinctions or because the island’s residents have been struggling through a prolonged economic and infrastructural decline.34 Though it is impossible to draw any conclusions from the limited posts regarding Puerto Rico, it does reveal some of the limitations of Lin’s memorial in addressing the intersection between the social landscape and the physical. However, the human landscape which is absent yet present by omission in What is Missing? is made visible if we approach it from its boundaries, or, as I argue, a border ecology. The landscapes that are mapped by Lin’s memorial are themselves encoded bits and bytes of data that create an illusion of representation.  Ibid., 698.  This situation would be exacerbated dramatically by the landfall of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. Recall, however, that this version of Lin’s memorial lasted through 2015. 33 34

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Her world map is a visual filing system for historical fragments, memories, and user-generated anecdotes. In this sense, What is Missing? fulfills Sean Cubitt’s assessment that the unfolding of digital space generates an “endlessly updatable map, which contains the past as it marks out the future: a series of binary addresses in a potentially bottomless databank.”35 This complex “unfolding of digital space,” which in 1998 seemed revolutionary, is the norm in 2015s social media landscape. Why would anyone today upload a memory to Lin’s map when they can broadcast it to the world via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or any number of other platforms?

Maya Lin and the Memorial What is Missing? accesses a kind of 1960s of techno-utopian thinking through its connections with two of Lin’s seminal works I mentioned earlier: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and her Storm King Wavefield. These pieces hinge on a physical positioning within and manipulation of the earth, respectively, and I argue that they contribute to an understanding of the digital memorial that is intimately linked to the 1960s ecological movement. The polished granite wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed a quarter-century before What is Missing?, is a touchstone in Lin’s oeuvre. It informs her approach to history, commemoration, and the earth itself: at once a minimalist work and a monument embedded within a constructed landscape. In many ways, this earlier memorial prefigures the ecological concerns that would become central to Lin’s artistic practice three decades later. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial belongs to the lineage of Land and Earth art, as it exhibits a broader ecological sensibility, one that emphasizes interconnectedness and embeddedness. Additionally, this early memorial grappled with the Romantic-era positioning of human and nonhuman. Such analysis of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial gives insights into how Lin’s thought was influenced by the back-to-the-land, whole systems thinking that gave rise to post-Minimalist earthworks. By tracing the influences that inform the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, one can better understand how What is Missing? emerges from an analogous relationship to the earth—one that emphasized the systemic interdependence of individuals, objects, and of spatial experience. Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial gave physical form to the American public’s fraught relationship with the Vietnam War. Triumphal, figurative  Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (SAGE Publications, 1998), 50.

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monuments had no place in a postmodern society that had become mistrustful of narratives of progress and heroism. The Vietnam war (1955–1975) was fought with boots on the ground as well as through images that would become inscribed in public memory. The war was the first to be broadcast on the nightly news and the first to be viewed simultaneously in the homes of people around the nation and the world. The list of iconic photographs and film that this journalism created is lengthy: children covered in napalm, monks on fire, helicopters pushed from the deck of an aircraft carrier, and protesters bearing flowers to a line of soldiers. These images—still and televisual—shaped critical discourse around the war regarding its consequences, and helped to question the motivations for continuing the occupation. Lin, with her polished black granite memorial, entrenched within the Washington Mall’s grounds and bearing a chronological list of names, understood the futility of adding yet another image to the roster. While much has been made of the memorial’s reflective surface, the list of names, the active process of memorialization, and the incorporation of the viewer within its form, Lin’s initial competition sketches (Fig.  2.2) reveal a more critical intention. Her entry was a set of two drawings, mixed media on paper, arranged vertically. The upper sketch inspired the phrase “scar upon the earth” or “black gash of shame” as a particularly apt description.36 Two-thirds green, and one-third white, the background reads as an homage to Color Field Painting and its evocation of the sublime. Within the green field, the memorial emerges, a minimal dark chevron centered in the frame with its apex pointing upwards. Lin, as indicated by the position of the horizon, has situated the viewer slightly above the earth, suspended in space. The lower drawing illustrates one of the memorial’s arms pointing to the Washington Monument (the other, not pictured, points to the Lincoln Memorial). In this second image, the sky is blue, with the grass that same shade of green, lending continuity to the drawings. The composition has been altered from the first drawing, however, with the horizon positioned roughly three-quarters of the way up the page. This perspective replaces 36  See the New York Times Opinion piece “The Black Gash of Shame” April 14, 1985. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/14/opinion/the-black-gash-ofshame.html. The choice of “Gash of shame” also reveals the gendered nature of the critique—with “gash” referring to a woman’s anatomy—an emasculated nation reeling from ignominious defeat (See Marita Sturken “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial” Representations 35, Summer 1991, for a more detailed analysis).

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Fig. 2.2  Maya Lin, Competition Drawings for Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981)

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the eerie, elevated positioning of the upper drawing with a sense of groundedness; here the viewer is, like the Memorial, embedded within the earth. The Washington Monument appears in white above the horizon, distant and towering over the Memorial and the viewer. Daniel Abramson has argued that this direct pointing to the two established memorials (Washington and Lincoln) revivifies “the symbols that equilibrate the vertiginous trauma of the Vietnam War and bracket all attempts at historical understanding.”37 Abramson’s critique recasts the Memorial as apologia, pointing out that the trauma of the Vietnam War can be softened through proper historical contextualization. Yet, the ambiguity of the sketch gives rise to another interpretation as well: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s dark form can be read as a long shadow cast by the Washington obelisk. Within this chronological reconfiguring, the founding of the United States is no longer innocent, but complicit in the grand tragedy of the Vietnam War. The drawing’s minimalism lends itself to ambiguity, and the Memorial owes much of its rhetorical heft to this style. Lin, however, avoided making a direct connection with Richard Serra’s and Donald Judd’s canonical minimalism, although comparisons with Serra’s controversial Tilted Arc (1981) were unavoidable. Marita Sturken writes that these minimalist works epitomized the “alienating effect of modern sculpture on certain sectors of the viewing public,” but that lumping Lin’s memorial in with the modernists privileges a “formalist reading of its design and [negates] its commemorative and textual functions.”38 By 1982, calling the Vietnam Veterans Memorial “minimalistic” was meant as an insult, connoting “obscurity, arrogance, and elitism,”39 and echoing the critique of Serra’s “alienating” modernism. Abramson takes a different critique of Lin’s design, claiming that her monuments “popularized the difficult formal vocabulary of minimalism, subverting its effects and thus making it ­accessible to a wider audience.”40 The easy visual comparison to Serra’s Tilted Arc notwithstanding, Lin’s approach to the memorial was diametrically opposed to the goals of Minimalism. According to Dina Deitsch, Lin  Abramson, 702.  Marita Sturken, “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial” Representations 35 (Summer 1991), 121. 39  Abramson, 703. 40  Abramson, 705. With this quote, he refers not only to the minimalism of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but also her Civil Rights Memorial and the Women’s Table at Yale University. 37 38

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was more interested in “creating environments or adjusting sites in a way that alters or increases a visitor’s perception of the landscape.”41 For Lin, it was no longer about the object, but an integration of the object and its surroundings, reshaping the earth and in doing so, reshaping our relationship to history. In this sense, the early design had far more in common with the generation of Land artists than with the minimalist approach to public sculpture. Lin’s largest-scale commission to date, the Wavefield at the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, marks a kind of culmination of Lin’s engagement with the land as material and process. The 11-acre site houses four acres of the earthwork, consisting of seven rows of rolling waves of grass-covered earth. Each wave is between 10 to 15 feet high, and the rows are 300 feet long.42 Lin modeled the design on the same scale as ocean waves, but their rendering in solid earth transforms a roiling seascape into an uncanny landscape. The project serves as a work of active environmental reclamation, lining a former gravel pit with low impact grasses that serve as a drainage system.43 Wavefield is a contradiction in terms—a human manipulation of the earth’s surface that acts to reclaim and reinstate natural processes. Accordingly, the piece blurs the lines between Land art, landscape architecture, and sustainable design. The connections to the ocean, the swells and troughs of the waves, evoke both an intuitive rhythm and mathematical precision. Waves also conjure the romance and the sublimity of the sea, whether in the epic language of Herman Melville or the frenzied brushstrokes of a J.M.W. Turner painting. Wavefield prefigures the tension and contradiction inherent to What is Missing?. It links the environmental with the technological, the Romantic vision of a vanishing world with the pragmatism of sustainable design. In Storm King Wavefield, we see the echoes of both a holistic and systemic approach to the land that had its origins in an unlikely place: 1960s ecological thinking. The publication of Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), NASA’s famous “Earthrise” (1968) photograph, and the popularization of cybernetics and systems theory44 all contributed to the formation of an environmental consciousness that was reflected in the art and design of the  Deitsch, 4.  Richard Andrews, “The Shape of Water: Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield” Storm King Wavefield, 1st ed. Richard Andrews, ed. (Storm King Art Center, 2009), 10. 43  Ibid. 44  First elucidated by Norbert Wiener in 1948, but gaining traction throughout the 1950s and 60s. 41 42

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decade. Additionally, Buckminster Fuller’s “dymaxion”45 principle and his seminal text Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968) inspired a generation to “increase efficiency through the use of technology.”46 Thus, ecologically minded architects and designers such as Victor Papanek prescribed solutions to the pollution of mid-century cities by emphasizing approaches that would be minimally invasive, and sensitive yet “revolutionary.” Papanek believed that in order for design to be “ecologically responsible,” it “must be independent of concern for the gross national product.”47 Together, these disparate strains—art, literature, architecture, and design—united in a holistic brand of ecology, one less centered on twenty-first century notions of technological sustainability and more along the lines of a Guattarian interconnectedness as described earlier. The ecological mindset of the 1960s influenced both the canonical Land Artists and the techno-utopian New Communalists, albeit to dramatically different ends. Both of these movements feed into the legacy of twenty-first century eco-art, particularly contemporary earthworks like Wavefield and digital landscapes such as What is Missing?. Lin’s competition sketch for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial stands in a transitional moment, between the 1960s and the present, then a not-quite-resolved gesture. The interplay of light and shadow, the poetics and politics of the void, and the implications of visual and personal reflection are set against the systematic nature of the list. It will serve this argument to better understand these dueling, yet related, impulses—the desire to head “back to the land” and the monumental urge to reshape that land.

Land Art In recent years, art historians have taken up the challenge of exploring the connections between Land Art and environmentalism. Although earlier analyses and critiques of Land Art stressed its environmental insensitivity, art historian Mark Cheetham argues that the impetus for Land and Earth 45  A portmanteau of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “tension” that described Fuller’s ideal techno-utopian society, one that advocated for technological efficiency and centralized power in the hands of elites (James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s. MIT Press, 2014, 75). 46  James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2014), 75. 47  Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 2nd ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1984), 252.

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Art was found in both the well-documented desire to escape the machinations of the art world and in the stirrings of the modern environmentalist movement. This led to a reliance on the tropes of “absence, invisibility, remoteness, and ephemerality.”48 For example, in Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–1970), absence is palpable. This earthwork, a 240,000 ton rectilinear displacement of earth on Mormon Mesa outside of Overton, Nevada, alters the profile of the mesa it occupies. Seventy-eight miles from Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport, Double Negative demands a pilgrimage. Its existence outside of the gallery space translates into a gravitational presence, pulling the determined viewer into its field. The piece is purposefully remote, requiring a lengthy hike up the mesa or all-wheel-­ drive vehicles to traverse the terrain. Double Negative also contains a play on vision, for it is a void channeled into the rock and soil. From a distance, it appears invisible, only materializing upon approach. Heizer’s earthwork constantly subverts traditional notions of vision, what can and can’t be seen from a given perspective, and its correlation, what can and can’t be experienced. Finally, the piece is intentionally ephemeral, as wind and rain have eroded the sides, and huge boulders dislodge or hang precariously overhead. Heizer toyed with the idea of reinforcing Double Negative with concrete, but ultimately chose to leave the artwork to the elements. Photographs of Double Negative fail to convey its play on scale—the compression and expansion of space in relation to the viewer. Scalar shifts were part of the larger cultural conversation because of scientific advancements at both extremes. Charles and Ray Eames’s 1968 version of the seminal film Powers of Ten, for example, played with the idea of scale and brought into relation the ends of the universe and the interior of a carbon atom. Earthworks such as Heizer’s Double Negative sought to render this cognitive shift instinctual and phenomenological. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, “geography is the space of the map, that which is regulated by measurable abstract coordinates…a space whose location or region is abstracted from its lived qualities. Landscape, by contrast is that space revealed by sensation, which has no fixed coordinates but transforms and moves as a body passes through it.”49 Double Negative’s shifts of scale point to a shift from abstract geography, the fact of the artwork’s location, 48  Mark Cheetham, “The Absent Objects of Eco Art: Strategies of the Remote & Ephemeral,” 1340. 49  Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 72.

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to its role in constructing a landscape. From satellite and aerial photographs, Heizer’s piece appears as a contained rectilinear void—a small protrusion of negative space set against the drop-off of the mesa. On the approach into the chasm, Double Negative is almost disappointing, reading as shallower than it actually is. The viewer has no way to judge the relative height of each wall. However, upon entering the space, it is evident that the walls loom overhead, and a sense of instability, entropy, and impending danger emanates from the dislodged boulders lining the ground. Finally, exiting the channel gives way to an unobstructed view of the land below. The vastness of the Western landscape opens off the mesa framed by a river snaking its way down the valley floor just as any Hudson River School painter would have depicted (Fig. 2.3) The atmospheric perspective lends an indistinct haze to the distant surroundings. Space is radically compressed and expanded, an embodied experience of scale. The tropes of absence, invisibility, remoteness, and ephemerality that Cheetham described formed significant pillars of the 1960s environmentalist aesthetic and underscored a desire to reject art world conventions. For example, Carson’s Silent Spring, her account of a landscape damaged on every level by the toxic effects of the pesticide DDT, touched on each of them: the absence of songbirds (hence the “silent” spring of the title), the invisible nature of the toxic chemicals pervading the environment, the “dark, underground sea”50 carrying the poisons to remote locations, and the fleeting, ephemeral existence of human life on the planet. Tellingly, the four tropes that Cheetham described as essential to environmentalist art have their origins in a holistic, Romantic view of the earth while at the same time forming part of a postwar systems-oriented conception. James Nisbet describes this seemingly contradictory notion, writing that Land Art has “internalized the tension between the object quality of the earth in space photographs and its construction via systems by turning these same tensions upon the minimalist object.”51 He notes this utopian i­magining of the earth as “both a singular physical object and a systematic network.”52 This is also evident in the tension between any given earthwork, such as my earlier example of Double Negative and its surrounding mystique. The canonical earthworks of the 1960s and early 1970s all engaged networks of dissemination and relied upon them for value. In the case of  Carson, 42.  Nisbet, 86. 52  Ibid., 9–10. 50 51

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Fig. 2.3  The view from Double Negative, showing the edge of Mormon Mesa. Image courtesy of the author

Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty, reviewers noted the interplay between the work itself and its photograph and filmic documentation. Laurence Alloway, writing at the time, claimed that, “the film and the object exist in a complementary not an explanatory relationship.”53 Caroline Jones cites the complicated relationship between the “non studio” practice of Smithson and the need for his gallery to guarantee value, “reinscrib[ing] his creativity in that old modernist sanctuary, the studio.”54 The emphasis placed on discourse is partially due to the Jetty’s submergence under the waters of the Great Salt Lake almost immediately after its construction (which had taken place during a drought), and its

 Lawrence Alloway, “Site Inspection,” Artforum (October 1976), 51.  Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 271. 53 54

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reappearance beginning in 1999.55 Obscured in a way wholly unintended by its creator, the Jetty existed for those decades primarily in academic and art world discourse, film, and photographs. The piece served as a figment of legend rather than a physical object to be experienced. In 2016 accelerated climate change, drought, and the exacerbating effects of the 21-mile causeway splitting the lake had radically reduced the water level, leaving the Jetty surrounded by sand and salt rather than water. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is one example among many earthworks that exists as both object and a discursive art-world apparatus. Heizer’s earthwork-in-progress, City (1972–ongoing) is closed to the public as of this writing due to its continuing construction, and the viewer only engages the work through a series of commissioned photographs.56 Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) owes its aura to photographs published in the April 1980 issue of Artforum.57 Those iconic images cemented the link between the piece and the presence of lightning, which “still does not constitute the abiding on-­ site experience of the Field whose design is not driven exclusively or even primarily by the conduction of electrical current.”58 This simultaneous existence of a singular object and a networked discourse surrounding it is appropriately analogous to the earlier discussion of What is Missing?. Lin presents the “whole earth” first—not as an “earth in space” photograph, but as a minimalist outline. The constant movement into and out of the map mimics the desire to view the earth as an object as well as to explore the network of actors (humans and nonhumans alike) that trigger the disappearances registered on the site. This tension— between discrete objects and an interconnected network—harkens back to the dilemma posed by the 1960s and 1970s earthworks. If viewers take a given earthwork at face value, as a deeply experiential hole in the ground (as in Heizer’s Double Negative) or a carefully placed rock pile (Spiral 55  For more on the preservation and conservation issues surrounding Spiral Jetty and its stewardship by the Dia Art Foundation, see Melissa Stanford, “The Salt of the Earth Sculpture; Debating Intervention as Nature Does Its Work” New York Times January 13, 2004. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/arts/the-salt-of-theearth-­sculpture-debating-intervention-as-nature-does-its-work.html. 56  The site, administered by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), has a planned opening date of 2020. 57  Notably, visitors to Lightning Field are prohibited from taking photographs, which would disrupt the piece’s aura. 58  James Nisbet, “A Brief Moment in the History of Photo-Energy: Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field” Grey Room 50, Winter 2013: 76.

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Jetty), they may risk losing its larger significance. Experiencing the piece only as photographs, text, and art world critique downplays the necessary relationship to the human body and its placement within a larger landscape. What is Missing? requires such a negotiation between network and objects, discursive apparatus and wholeness, that sets up the experience of the site as ongoing, never quite capable of a resolution. In the 2000s as in the 1960s, the shifting frameworks of meaning, generated by surrounding networks of discourse, layers of multimedia representations, and the materiality of the art itself, invite the viewer to question traditional notions of authorship and reception. Lin’s eco-memorial shifts rapidly between different scales, virtual and physical embeddedness, and levels of information. This action, and the resulting reconfiguration of the environment it entails, is a direct reference to that earlier generation of land artists, one that had set the stage for Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, her Wavefield, and What is Missing?. New Communalism and Techno-Utopianism What is Missing? positions the power of technology to upend established hierarchies of species, class, and location. While technological developments influenced Land Art in a more circuitous way59—through ecological and systems thinking—these same developments would manifest elsewhere in a more direct manner. Historian Fred Turner has written extensively on the digital utopianism that links the New Communalists and the social left of the 1960s to the techno-revolutionary rhetoric of the Wired 1990s and the popularization of the World Wide Web as a vehicle for social restructuring. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2008), Turner identified the entrepreneur Stewart Brand as the key figure in this transition. Starting in 1968, Brand’s publication of the Whole Earth Catalog linked the back to the land, environmentalist movements of the post-Silent Spring era to emerging, newly accessible technologies. Much has been written on the Whole Earth Catalog, including its offerings, its philosophical and political bent, and even its typography.60 Felicity D. Scott 59  See Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (University of Chicago Press, 1996) for more on Smithson and the technological sublime. 60  See Lorraine Wild and David Karwan, “Agency and Urgency: The Medium and its Message,” Greg Castillo, “Counterculture Terroir: California’s Hippie Enterprise Zone” and Felicity D. Scott, “Networks and Apparatuses, Circa 1971,” Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. ed. Andrew Blauvelt, (Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2015).

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summarized the ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog project: “at play was both a utopian discourse of access to tools and the celebration of mind-­ altering forms of consciousness.”61 “Tools” consisted primarily of books and periodicals, as well as other goods that “would help transport the reader into an environment in which she or he might be able, at the global level, to spot the laws of nature and, at the local, personal level, to act in accord with them.”62 The covers that graced the Whole Earth Catalog played off the theme of “whole earth,” a reference to the initial reluctance of NASA to release images of the globe from space. The image of the earth, the iconic “blue marble” or the “earthrise” photographs, used on various Catalog covers, lends itself to a number of interpretations. From an ecological standpoint, the blue marble reminds the viewer of their position in space, a single point on a fragile globe, itself suspended in the vastness of the universe. From a utopian perspective, particularly that of a digital utopia, the whole earth represented a flattening of hierarchies. The massive built structures of industry, of the technocratic society that threatened to absorb the countercultural youth of the 1960s, are rendered absent, insignificant. Instead, the entire earth is whole, connected within the penumbra of its atmosphere, and serene beneath white clouds. Following Nisbet’s argument regarding Land Art, the “whole earth” image was at once Romantic and systemic, a representation of the overlap between human and planetary systems. Within the Whole Earth Catalog, the page layout gives a visual indication of this utopian project. Lorraine Wild and David Karwan, writing in the 2015 Hippie Modernism exhibition catalogue, emphasize that the content is “hierarchically flat” and “not tethered to a grid,” with low-end typography and clip-art illustrations rather than the more sophisticated layouts of Madison Avenue marketing firms.63 Media historian Norman M. Klein remarked on the lack of “visual rhythm across the page” with nothing to organize the content.64 Wild and Karwan identify this as the visual style of a peer-to-peer exchange of 61  Felicity D.  Scott, “Networks and Apparatuses, circa 1971,” Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. ed. Andrew Blauvelt, (Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2015), 103. 62  Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 92. 63  Lorraine Wild and David Karwan, “Agency and Urgency: The Medium and its Message,” Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. ed. Andrew Blauvelt, (Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2015), 50. 64  Norman M. Klein, quoted in Wild and Karwan, 50.

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practical knowledge, one that would pervade the earliest computer networks.65 Brand and his New Communalist brethren emphasized such knowledge exchange as the foundation of a new social order, one organized “around looping circuits of energy and information” which “presented the possibility of a stable social order based…on the ebb and flow of communication.”66 In a sense, then, this techno-utopianism required its adherents to think in an ecological manner.67 The three most-cited influences on this techno-utopian line of thought are Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller. Wiener’s cybernetics set the stage for interdisciplinary modes of working. Designers Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro have traced how, in the cybernetic era, scientists began to understand how language and observation not only describe the system, but affect it, marking the turn towards interdisciplinary modes of working and a connection to the counterculture.68 McLuhan’s widely influential Understanding Media (1964) served to call attention to the means by which messages were distributed and received, marking a key moment in the history of media and visual culture. However, it was Fuller’s writing that formed a key link between the Romanticism of the American transcendentalists (through his aunt Margaret Fuller) and the ecological philosophy of the New Communalists. Fuller proposed technological solutions to the problem of ecological crisis, claiming that the “proper deployment of information and technology could literally save the human species from annihilation.”69 Fuller argued that with increased computational capability, humans could pull the species back from the edge, and would be free to focus on what separates them from machines. In An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth Fuller writes: “man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate ‘comprehensivity.’”70 For Fuller, “comprehensivity” lay beyond the projected computational capabilities of the era, and manifested itself in the kind of  Wild and Karwan, 51.  Turner, 38. 67  akin to Guattari’s Three Ecologies. 68  Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro, “How Cybernetics Connects Computing, Counter Culture, and Design,” Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. ed. Andrew Blauvelt, (Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 2015), 130. 69  Turner, 57. 70  R.  Buckminster Fuller, An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 45. 65 66

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interdisciplinarity and systems approach championed by the New Communalists. By conceiving of the Earth simultaneously as a discrete unit and a deeply interconnected system, such thinking avoids the trap of artificial distancing of human and nature that Guattari, McKibben, Morton and others would later elucidate. An integrated human-computationalnatural system, according to Fuller and his acolytes, would stave off the planet’s destruction. Stewart Brand and his adherents would go on to create the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) in the 1980s and start Wired magazine in 1993, forging an alliance between the leftist utopians of the 1960s and a more techno-libertarian strain of conservatism that became pervasive in the 1990s.71 If the tools in the Whole Earth Catalog were “mechanisms that transformed their users into actors in the dramatic myths of American individualism,”72 then the pairing of “personal” with “computing” extended this libertarianism to the digital realm.73 Such an ethos would pervade the rise of net.art that decade and continue to inform later Internet artists. This connection places Internet-based eco-art such as What is Missing? in a curious position—necessarily politically leftist, such artworks nonetheless cling to a vision of technology as liberating, the means to transform society and reshape the earth. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between a distinctly neoliberal vision of technological salvation through innovation and that inherited from Brand and the New Communalists. The late-1960s legacy was more holistic, reforming social relations through consciousness-raising and new forms of communication. Taking into account this scholarship on New Communalism and the counterculture serves to ground Lin’s eco-memorial (and digital eco-art more broadly), in a historical framework distinct from the Land Art trajectory detailed earlier. What is Missing? can be described as a “whole earth” image, albeit a computer-generated one. This particular depiction, however, exposes the entire holistic line of thought as a fallacy, for how can human beings envision the whole earth when aspects of it are permanently missing? On the macro level, then, the earth is whole. Only upon entering the piece, engaging and clicking through the vignettes, can one discern its startling incompleteness. 71  Turner, 3. Turner later quotes Brand as saying that, in the context of the Whole Earth Catalogue, “responsibility is individual stuff” (Turner, 99). 72  Ibid., 93. 73  Ibid., 105–107.

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The Database and the Archive Establishing What is Missing’s? historical and intellectual antecedents of the 1960s gives a sense of how ecology, digital/computer art, and Romantic ideals of “wholeness” were linked. A more immediate influence on Lin’s Internet-based map is the 1990s-era impulse to catalogue, archive, and (most importantly) disseminate that information to the public. Julian Stallabrass has written extensively on how early Internet-based art projects gravitated toward this kind of record-keeping, conflating computational data with the anecdotal data of human existence. For the net. art generation, “the most fundamental characteristic…is that it deals with data, and can be thought of as a variety of database forms.”74 Yet applying the term “data” to What is Missing? is both telling and deeply problematic. There is data, of course; the site is constructed by a computerized system of representation. However, the more problematic use of the term revolves around the idea of a database, particularly a socially generated or crowdsourced one. Typically, a database is a structured set of data, with that “data” assumed to be factual. Within Lin’s What Is Missing?, facts and memories conflate with each other, and the piece leans heavily on the power of the romanticized individual anecdote rather than a rigorous statistical analysis of lost biodiversity. What is Missing?, however, is far from the first Internet-based piece to mine the ambiguity of a social database. Spanish-born media artist Antoni Muntadas began his File Room project offline in 1979, later launching the website thefileroom.org in 1994. The File Room site, maintained for over two decades with the same interface as it had at the time of its launch, details documented instances of censorship beginning with accusations against Socrates in 399  B.C.E. and including such touchstones as the bowdlerization of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Site visitors browse the database by geographic location, time, or medium of expression, and can upload new anecdotes or even grievances.75 On the site, Muntadas writes that “TFR remains an organic initiative; its shape ultimately determined by the

74  Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce (Tate Publishing, 2003), 26. 75  For an example of the latter, see Patrick Garcia’s contribution to The File Room from 2007  in which the SCAD student details the results of an academic integrity violation brought against him by a professor. Online. http://thefileroom.org/documents/dyn/ DisplayCase.cfm/id/1160.

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input of participants.”76 True to the nature of the project, nothing is censored, no matter how irrelevant or obscure. The aesthetics of the site are, on the surface, dramatically different from those of Lin’s eco memorial. The File Room is deliberately accessible, requiring neither excessive processing power nor a broadband Internet connection to load. The initial page hosts two low-resolution images on a dark blue background, with simple white text detailing the project’s origins and goals. One image is a grid of nine file drawers, with the center replaced by a clip art rendition of a computer, a schematic world map on its screen, reminding the viewer of the Internet’s global promise. The second is a photograph of a man sitting at a desk. As he looks towards a 1990s-era computer monitor, stacks of filing cabinets surround him. The theme of the site comes across in these two images—the juxtaposition of older filing methods with new technology, The File Room both continues a longer history of documentation and promises to improve upon the past. Clicking through to the site’s files gives the viewer choices of how to organize the information: by time, geographic region, grounds for censorship, or medium. The dominant language is English, but entries in other (primarily European) languages do occur. At its best, the File Room encourages connections, inviting linkages between the bowdlerization of Shakespeare and, for example, the erasure of Shepard Fairey’s murals. Those connections, however, are spurious, devoid of the necessary context to be able to say something larger about the nature of censorship. The File Room mimics a database in its form and mission, but in practice it comprises something closer to an archive. The archive is marked by a sense of capriciousness, something any visitor to The File Room or even to What is Missing? will readily see. In her study of the physical archive, historian Carolyn Steedman describes the contradictions between the “selected and chosen documentation from the past” and “the mad fragmentation that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there.”77 The image of the detritus of the past is in marked contrast to how in “quiet folders and bundles is the neatest demonstration of how state power has operated, through ledgers and lists and indictments, and through what is missing from them.”78 Steedman picks up on these two  www.thefileroom.org.  Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Rutgers University Press, 2002), 68. 78  Ibid., 68. 76 77

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conditions of the archive—its randomness (what is preserved) and its intent (what is missing). In the Internet-based projects of Muntadas and later Lin, the focus on loss and censorship resonates uneasily with the evidence—an incomplete record of presence. The unevenness of the recollections is more evident in What is Missing? due to the memorial’s spatial layout. It is simply easier to see the blank spaces on the map, rather than interpolate where the gaps in Muntadas’s list may lie. As I mentioned earlier, some regions of Lin’s memorial, the Middle East, West Africa, and most of South America, among others, are dramatically underrepresented. The phrase What is Missing? can refer to ecological gaps, but instead hints at the social and technological inequalities that alter the digital landscape that Lin presents. Steedman’s observation about the archive and state power is especially relevant here—the vignettes presented tell a straightforward story of ecological disaster, while the absent memories allude to something deeper, more structural. Where the two stories meet—where the anecdotes rub up against the silences—reveals more about how climate change, extinction, economic and social upheaval are linked than does either on its own. The digital archive projects I have discussed—Muntadas’s File Room and Lin’s eco-memorial—each mine the aesthetics of multiple modes of record-keeping. In her book Materializing New Media, Anna Munster offers up the baroque Wunderkammer (curiosity cabinet) as the historical antecedent of the digital archive or database “in the amassing of the history of nature as anecdote, and in its tendency to revel in the bizarre and unnatural as it was concerned with demonstrating the presence of the underlying laws of the world.”79 Munster points out the overlapping concerns of the cabinet (to understand and catalogue the natural world), and those of the microhistories contained within it. This interplay of organization and disarray, of personal recollections buttressing the established historical record constitutes the folded space of both the baroque and the digital. Such interactions, Munster argues, keep the Wunderkammer and the  digital media project alike from lapsing into stasis. She describes an installation that was placed at the Seattle Public Library, Making Visible the Invisible, that mapped out the real-time circulation patterns of nonfiction books: “suddenly the library is no longer a storage house that must be navigated and from which something must be retrieved. It is a hub of transaction and of pattern formation and decay, of people converging and  Munster, 67.

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diverging in their interests and participating in the visualization of nodes of habit, preference, and transformation.”80 With this observation in mind, we find that Lin’s eco-memorial’s stated goal is but one part of the whole. Instead, its status as digital media, as a constantly updated and expanding Internet-based project, gives insight into another set of pattern formations, convergences, and divergences. Those multiple narratives running through and just beneath the surface of the memorial, that complicate each other and upend expectations, places What is Missing? in dialogue with pioneering net.art projects as well as Munster’s theorization of the baroque in the digital. To continue the analogy, the Wunderkammer is a contained space, and Lin’s memorial similarly adheres to the formal qualities of its map and the timeline. However, What is Missing? avoids the more open-ended social engagement of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.81 Integrating with a platform like Twitter, rather than keeping the material confined to the website, produces a piece radically different in tone and reach. In 2013, Canadian artist Sharon Switzer collected tweets under the hashtag of “Crazyweather” and set them against the backdrop of a rotating “blue marble” Earth (Fig. 2.4). The piece is a ten-minute ambient video, shown initially at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum’s exhibition Carbon 14: Climate is Culture (2013–2014). The video opens with a dark gray smoky, atmospheric haze, from which an outline of the earth emerges. The earth moves from a close up, filling the frame, to a blue globe rotating farther away. The gray haze, alluding to pollution, encroaches on the earth and at times covers it entirely. Animated text flies in and out of the right-hand side of the frame, cataloguing the #crazyweather tweets along with their metadata. The tweets offer accounts of “crazy” weather from Brazil, Italy, India, Mongolia, Kenya, the United States, and Venezuela, among others. They range from alarmed (“Crazy weather in #Islamabad right now. It’s so dark!”) to comedic (“I think Mother Nature is drunk!!”) to instructive (“Glad summer’s now warming up. Crazy weather patterns r not good for plants, insects, birds & yes humans too!”)—a cornucopia of experience  Munster, 79.  Twitter activism, while a major factor in the various local movements of the Arab Spring, was pioneered in the Iranian election of 2009. See Negar Mottahedeh, #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life (Stanford University Press, 2015) for a more complete analysis of the movement and its repercussions across social media. 80 81

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Fig. 2.4  Sharon Switzer, #Crazyweather (2013). Stills from digital video

delivered 140 characters at a time. The hashtag allows Switzer to find relevant tweets within Twitter’s veritable tsunami of information, links, opinions, feuds, and assorted nonsense. The end selection is, of course, curated, selected by the artist, and ordered for maximum effect. The tweets are all in English, as with most of the memories uploaded to What is Missing? Unlike Lin, or even Muntadas before her, Switzer does not present the viewer with a searchable database. Twitter itself is that database—any user can search the site for #crazyweather, #globalwarming, or some other indicator of climate change. Instead, the work of the piece lies in the curation and organization of the tweets. Set against the gray, smoky atmosphere, looking upon the “whole earth” in space, the aesthetics of the video present the viewer with a sense of fragility. Seen through this lens, these tweets are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. The individual posts (“Welcome to Montreal, where the weather is crazy and the seasons don’t matter” “Crazy weather tonight! Had a tornado warning near me! Too close for comfort! Xoxo”) combine to form a metanarrative of escalating climate change. #Crazyweather’s intentions and Switzer’s reading of the tweets aside, the piece hinges primarily on the unequal social landscape it reveals. Crowdsourcing relies on what is commonly termed the “wisdom of the crowd,” but here, the crowd seems alternatively ignorant, self-centered, and worst of all, banal. Part of the issue is the medium of Twitter—the pressure for a user to be brief, clever, and most importantly, noticed within one 140 characters. Posting on Twitter is a performance in itself, an explicitly public act, and this added pressure leads to hyperbole, raising the question of just how dark was it in Islamabad, or if that tornado even touched down. Unlike the anonymous postings on The File Room, these tweets are traceable to individual users, many of whom have highly developed personas and vast

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numbers of followers. Each tweet, then, cannot be read in isolation, but by divorcing these pithy statements from the Twitter apparatus, that is exactly what #Crazyweather does. Switzer downplays the performative aspect of tweeting, encouraging the viewer to take each at face value. On social media, weather events are often treated with ironic distance. Twenty-first century winters have shown that an inch of snow in Atlanta paralyzes the city and strands commuters in a sea of memes, while Boston’s 108.6 inches of snow during the winter of 2014–15 were the cause for impromptu snow tunnels and igloo-building. Although weather extremes are deadly to escalating numbers of people, the lens of social media neuters their power. These vignettes attest once more to the performative nature of social media and the tendency toward hyperbole, that which the Twitter posts of #Crazyweather help to comprise. As with What is Missing? the unevenness of the experience also comes to the fore: what is but an inconvenience for one Twitter user (a freak snowstorm in May) could be a life and death matter for someone living on the edge: the more precarious someone’s situation, the less they will tweet about it. Regional as well as class differences abound; as I will discuss in Chaps. 3 and 5, flooding (and its Biblical overtones) can be an unmitigated disaster in a place like New Orleans or Houston, but dictates the cyclical nature of life in the Indo-Gangetic floodplain or along the Mississippi. Accordingly, another tweet from Switzer’s video: “I hereby dub this to be monsoon week in Ann Arbor, #michiganmonsoon #crazyweather” illustrates what happens when vital weather patterns in one part of the globe are played for laughs in another. #Crazyweather, in an earnest attempt to bring awareness to climate change, unintentionally demonstrates the entrenched colonial hierarchies of a supposedly borderless digital space. While the ambience of the video allows the mounting crisis to sneak up on the viewer, the visuals recall yet another staple of computer media: the screensaver. This association is deeply embedded in the spinning “blue marble,” charting a lineage from the rarified air of NASA’s archive to Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue to its use as an ambient, anodyne image rotating silently in the background. Aesthetics of space dominated screensaver design in the mid-1990s, with the era’s “flying through space” screensaver recalling a Starship Enterprise-esque voyage through hyperspace. The black expanse of the screen became conceptualized as a void in which morphing geometric shapes, flying toasters, and personalized messages would float endlessly, unmoored from any gravitational field. In 2009, Windows 7 introduced a 3D-“world” screensaver, a blue marble

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that mapped out the complex topography of the earth, thereby cementing the black void of the screen with the vast emptiness of space. Switzer’s #Crazyweather is far more atmospheric, bringing forth its blue marble out of a smoky haze, rather than a purely black screen. The connection to screensaver ambience and the aura of background imagery remains. The spinning globe “constructs the world after its own image and does so with so much success that it conceals its own way of construing the world.”82 This idea is worth considering at length—Switzer’s use of the slowly revolving Earth image does, in fact, reveal its inherent Romanticism. Humans here are pitted against a vast, unyielding Nature, with all the fury of a Turner painting. The world is whole, mysterious, and unknowable, with humans frantically tweeting their mundane thoughts into the misty void of space. I would note that although this seems far darker than the piece’s original intent, this tension unwittingly models that noted by Nisbet in his analysis of the 1960s ecological movement: the tendency to view Earth as both a Romantic whole and a series of interlocking, overlapping systems. Rather than relegate such projects to the realm of kitsch, as Morton would certainly argue, the tensions here reposition the human within a constant shifting of scale and distance. Those shifts of scale bring us back to Lin and What is Missing?, the motion into and out of the map, the focus on the individual memory as representative of escalating global trends.

Digital Eco-Spectacle and the Call to Action The translation from minimalist online memorial to activist artwork demands that What is Missing? have effects in the material world. It is the call to action, after all, that shifts the viewer from perusing the digital landscape to looking outward, searching for what is missing from lived existence. The call to action can be jarring, a shift from the aesthetic and the poetic to the utilitarian. Lin doesn’t build the call to action into her memorial, so it stands on a separate page of the site. She expects the viewer to move seamlessly between exploring the map and exploring outlets for activism, but there is no reason to assume that the trip through various memories will facilitate the transition to action. Other artists have sought 82  Dennis Skocz, “Environmental Management in the ‘Age of the World Picture,’” Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, eds. Ladelle McWhorter and Gail Stenstad (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 134.

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to aestheticize digital activism, however, but in the following case, the strategy’s shortcomings become all too apparent. Nazhia Mestaoui’s 1 Heart 1 Tree (2015) is comprised of a digital projection in an architectural space, visualizing a solution to the physical effects of deforestation. Through partnerships with seven NGOs in Senegal, Brazil, Peru, Ivory Coast, France, Australia, and India,83 Mestaoui set up a virtual supply chain—online donations led to trees planted, which were then projected as digital representations onto the Eiffel Tower during the Paris COP21 summit in December 2015. A real-time video stream of the digital projection remains online, and the viewer is free to replay 1 Heart 1 Tree in real time. Donations started at ten Euros for a single tree, and range up to 7000 Euros for a forest of 1000. The project was paired with a Kickstarter which raised 62,854 Euros to fund the 1 Heart 1 Tree website, the projection, and the logistics of the event.84 The aesthetics of the piece are unambiguous: for the projection, a bright green light plotted out the trail of an electrocardiogram (EKG), forming its familiar peaks and valleys. The color serves as a shorthand for ecological awareness as well as a reference to the greenery of replanted forests. Superimposed on the EKG line, in that same shade of green, trees begin to emerge and grow just under the moving light. These trees are digital sketches, comprised of a series of branching and interconnected lines, a schematic representation of a tree, rather than any attempt at mimetic representation. Close-ups of leaves and stems alternate with the trees. Overall, the aesthetic is one of a purely linear landscape set against a stark black background, much like the global map of What is Missing?. The project’s digital trees echo another set of computer-generated trees: Joana Moll’s Deforest. While Moll’s trees link the material and the virtual in terms of Google searches and the search engine’s resulting carbon footprint, Mestaoui’s schematic green trees provide a glimmer of hope that the tremendous power of the Internet can be harnessed to combat the effects of climate change. With a donation, the viewer-participant unlocks the option to create a “unique virtual tree.” Using the project’s app, users can alter the branching pattern and grow it to the rhythm of her heartbeat. Ostensibly, then, 83  Note that the Kickstarter for the project, created prior to its launch, gives only five locations, in Peru, Thailand, Romania, Australia, and Morocco. 84  1 Heart 1 Tree Kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1188361087/1-­ heart-­1-tree/description.

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each tree on the site and in the resulting projection is unique, the creation of the donor who enabled it. This then corresponds to the physical trees that are to be planted around the world, each an individual organism. The references to individuality dovetail with the image and aesthetics of the collective forest. 1 Heart 1 Tree asks us to concern ourselves with individual responses for the climate crisis, geared towards a collective solution. It is impossible to ignore that this is a problematic approach at best, one predicated on neoliberal rhetoric of personal responsibility and market solutions rather than the purview of the state. Claire Bishop’s critique of relational and socially engaged art resonates here, as she marks the “social inclusion agenda” as being “less about repairing the social bond than a mission to enable all members of society to be self-administering, fully functioning consumers who do not rely on the welfare state and who can cope with a deregulated, privatized world.”85 In Mestaoui’s model, it is the citizens of a well-moneyed Europe who transfer funds to the developing world (with the exception of the NGOs in France and Australia), but they do so in an unregulated manner spurred by emotion. 1 Heart 1 Tree, soliciting a donation-based response from the public, shifts the discourse of climate change away from the underlying structural causes. The piece elides the fact that international government response to climate change continues to privilege a neoliberal, technocratic perspective. This functions in contrast to Lin, whose call to action may focus on NGOs, but the overall ethos of the piece is rooted in systems thinking. In doing so, What is Missing? implicates everyone within the mass extinction. The website and call to action, however, is but one outlet for Mestaoui’s project. Its projection is both the piece’s most visible aspect and its connection to a longer history of socially engaged art. On the Eiffel Tower, the green lines of the trees entwine with the constantly beating EKGs, and the text of personal messages (such as, “Tree of Life,” “Coeur,” “Peaceful,” “Spread love”) blooms periodically into view.86 The lights of the projection compete with the spotlights of the tower itself, and the entire structure glows in the night, resembling an eerie green beacon on the Paris skyline. Superimposed on the Eiffel Tower, Mestaoui’s digital creations 85  Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 14. 86  One can assume there was some gatekeeping/curating going on—we know what happens when people are free to add anything they want. Some names do appear, such as “Camille,” for example. The text is mostly English and French, and non-Roman alphabets are left out altogether.

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are rendered more abstract than within the rectilinear space of the computer screen. The emerging trees read as forms both strictly digital—a kind of glowing green Matrix, to reference the 1999 film—and protean. With the growth of the trees, the tower glows more fully, and its shape comes into view against the night sky. As the trees reset and new growth begins, the structure darkens, losing its shape once more. Mestaoui’s visuals animate the tower itself, emphasizing the interconnected nature of all things—both organic, living, and manmade. The tower’s initial function as a radio antenna only underscores the theme of communication. In doing so, the projection renders the familiar unfamiliar, taking the iconic shape and repurposing it, mutating the wrought ironwork into a new lattice of digital branches and leaves. Projection has a long history within the visual arts, originating with the development of the magic lantern at the end of the seventeenth century and the resulting phantasmagoria theater of eighteenth-century Europe. These performance-spectacles rendered the supernatural visible, filling theaters with spectral presences, depictions of death, and terrifying hellscapes. The themes of death and the supernatural would continue throughout the development of early photography, intricately tied to the shifting interplay of light and shadow. There is a direct line from those early projection spectacles to the ghostly faces in Man Ray’s rayographs, to Claude Cahun’s alien self-representation, and on to the seemingly barren landscapes of the American West popularized by Ansel Adams. With projection, however, those still images become animated, recontextualized against their three-dimensional backdrop. We see a hint of the phantasmagoria in the fluid, haunting lines of the 1 Heart 1 Tree projection, as well as its eerie green glow. There is a fine line between the calming growth of the trees and the horror of the unknown. Public projection is also readily associated with social and political engagements in contemporary art. Provocations by artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jenny Holzer, as well as the 99 percent Bat Signal of the 2011 Occupy Movement, serve as a reminder of the medium’s capacity to challenge authority and to contest public space. Each of these artists, however, sets up an antagonistic relationship with the surface used. The projections both contest space and conquer it, if only symbolically. In relation to these more challenging projects, 1 Heart 1 Tree must depend on the goodwill of the crowd in order to succeed. Alienation, despair, and antagonism, for all their aesthetic potential, are at odds with the more pragmatic goals of the project.

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The activist core of 1 Heart 1 Tree, like that of What is Missing?, is that call to action on the part of the viewer/participant. It is at this moment that the viewer morphs from passive to active, a casual browser of the Internet to an actor undertaking a political gesture. With Mestaoui’s project, this transition is formulated within the digital fabric of the piece—it does not exist without the complicity of the public. Often referred to as “clicktivism” or “slacktivism,” this mode of online participation is frequently denigrated as mindless or self-serving, with the view that “individuals perform acts of clicktivism to exercise a sense of moral justification without the need to actually engage.”87 Halupka, in his analysis of online activism, defines clicktivism or slacktivism as “a reflexive political act contained within a moment of spontaneity,” with the reactive nature of the gesture being paramount.88 Criticism of this activist mode centers on the supposedly outsize nature of the personal gain in comparison to the unquantifiable benefit of a single “like,” “share,” online signature, or Twitter post. Under Halupka’s rubric, adding one’s recollections to What is Missing? would count as clicktivism, for, although the action generates original content, it is in direct response to a prompt and the examples given. The memories collected each comprise part of a whole, but on their own cost the viewer little in terms of time, risk, or creative energy. 1 Heart 1 Tree, however, demands the viewer’s financial commitment in order to succeed. The minimum ten euros requires more than a passing thought from the average (European) participant-donor, and it could even ­represent a significant percentage of discretionary income. The financial aspect of Mestaoui’s project, then, has more in common with socially engaged crowdfunding campaigns. In 2005, the microfinancing site Kiva (www.kiva.org) launched, touting the social benefits of entrepreneurship in the developing world, complete with inspirational quotes from Oprah Winfrey and the ability to browse categories designed to appeal to altruistic Westerners including “women,” “single parents,” and “shelter.” In Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011), Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo refer to microcredit as “moneylending for a social purpose.”89 In a study of microcredit in rural India, they determined that  Max Halupka, “Clicktivism: A Systematic Heuristic,” Policy and Internet 6 (2014), 117.  Ibid., 119. 89  Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Public Affairs Press, Kindle Edition), 166. 87 88

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although there were observable monetary gains and a measurable increase in the standards of living, “there was no sign of radical transformation. We found no evidence that women were feeling more empowered…they were not…exercising greater control over how the household spent its money. Nor did we see any differences in spending on education or health….”90 These results suggest that the social benefits of crowdfunding and microcredit primarily serve the lender, a similar dynamic as the clicktivist gestures discussed earlier. Mestaoui’s digital trees are not true crowdfunding, in the sense of a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign (although, as mentioned earlier, the project platform was funded through Kickstarter). Instead, 1 Heart 1 Tree resembles the funding structure of such environmental and social programs as Heifer International and Oxfam. In fact, reforestation NGOs, such as Trees for the Future, Plant a Billion, and the Arbor Day Foundation already use the same model, allowing mostly Western donors to fund trees, food plants, and other green programs across the globe. Critical to such ventures is the idea of discrete quantities: one can purchase a single chicken, a bag of tools, or a group of five trees, for example, framed as a gift being sent to a family or region in need. With Mestaoui’s intervention, established reforestation NGOs partner with the artist, receiving the benefits of increased visibility through the projection and her online platform. The result of the viewer/participant’s interaction with 1 Heart 1 Tree, then, is a physical, long-term addition to a remote landscape. An action completed in the digital sphere has its repercussions offline, Mestaoui reminds us, and that impact has the potential to be a positive one. The project’s relation to landscape, then, is a complicated one, hinging on the connection between the projected digital representation of a forest and the new growth being planted as a result. This is not a landscape that one can navigate in the digital sense; unlike What is Missing? there is no interactive visual component. Instead, such interaction takes place on a financial, biological, and ecological level. The landscape charted is, to recall Arjun Appadurai’s discussion of cultural globalization, both a financescape and a mediascape.91 It turns the focus back to its user-participants, rather than digitally representing the forests it will go on to benefit. To return to the discussion of the call to action, What is Missing? also depicts a social  Ibid., 171.   See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 90 91

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landscape rather than a “natural” one, but its structure obscures the conditions of its making. As a memorial, Lin’s piece looks backwards, trafficking in nostalgia (both visual and auditory) and personal recollection. It is perhaps because of this that the call to action sits uneasily within the memorial’s seamless design. We cannot replace what has gone missing, after all.

Connection and Disjuncture: The 2015 What is Missing? On Earth Day of 2015, Lin unveiled an overhaul of the site. Gone was the animated introduction with its silhouettes of vanishing species. Instead, the map appeared from the start, this time populated by a variety of colored icons rather than the uniform dots. Multicolored spirals indicated timelines, green targets conservation, and purple rings disaster, among others. Visitors could toggle between specific categories of recollection, including historical, personal, video, conservation, and disaster. Some icons expand to reveal an embedded series, such as in the disaster labeled “Climate Change.” Significant events within this category range from the first prediction of global warming in 1896 to Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical addressing the subject. The selected quotation from the latter emphasizes the Pope’s warning of an “unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequence for all of us.”92 Curiously, the icon for “Climate Change” is located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, approximately two-thirds of the way from the southern United States to the northern coast of Africa. It is as if as neutrally positioned as possible, although it is common knowledge that the Global North bears far more of the responsibility for climate change than any small Atlantic islands. Small target icons indicate conservation efforts, such as that of South Africa’s Kruger National Park. For this vignette, a photograph of a lush grassland accompanies text describing how Kruger became a national park in 1926, “considered to be of continental importance for black rhino conservation.”93 Under the section marked “Personal,” website users can upload their own 92  Pope Francis, Laudato Si, encyclical letter (2015). Available online. http://w2.vatican. va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-­ laudato-si.html. 93   Quoted text is linked to the World Wildlife Fund site: http://wwf.panda. org/?uProjectID=ZA0030.

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recollections, including a 1958 memory by John Fitzpatrick: “Western Meadowlarks once sang at the end of my driveway, but today they are nowhere to be found in Ramsey County, MN and their global population is plummeting. Widespread conversion of open grasslands to suburban sprawl and massive, mechanized farming is largely to blame.”94 Adding one’s own memory is straightforward; my personal recollection briefly details the vanishing of the coquí, Puerto Rico’s endangered tropical frog and national icon.95 In doing so, I remarked on the difference between the deafening roar of coquí calls that my parents described in the early 1980s and the discrete few we hear when visiting the island today. Upon receiving my submission, the site added a stock photograph of the tiny frog. Just below the text lies a link to submit one’s own memory, something that has spurred others to do the same. At the time of my coquí submission in September 2015, Puerto Rico was a dark shadow on the map, with no personal memories indicated. Within a year five more vignettes appeared, including another coquí, a text on water rationing, and a tribute to the island’s disappearing bioluminescent bay. The neighboring Caribbean islands, however, are still fairly empty as of this writing. The Dominican Republic boasts only one recollection, written by a non-­ Dominican who laments the disappearance of the coral reefs on his scuba visits.96 Jamaica is also home to a single dot, a 1970s memory of natural springs from the author’s mother’s childhood. It should come as no surprise that Haiti, an island nation devastated by poverty and natural disaster, and Cuba, politically embargoed and long denied Internet access, are completely blank. The existing vignettes take on a kind of rhythm, constrained by brevity and subject matter. Note the emphasis on sound and its trappings of nostalgia, generational ties, and, of course, the recognition of absence. Rather than scientific or even systematic observation, I suggest that these anecdotes are performative in nature. This assessment dovetails with that of media and cultural theorist Jose van Dijk, who posits that memory itself is a performance, rather than a static “event” to be recalled. “Mediated memory objects never stay put for once and for all: on the contrary, the 94  http://whatismissing.net/memory/western-meadowlarks-disappearing. Accessed 25 April 2017. 95  http://whatismissing.net/memory/vanishing-coqui. Note that I uploaded this before the disaster of Hurricane Maria (September 2017), which devastated humans and nonhumans alike. 96  http://whatismissing.net/memory/coral-reefs.

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deposits themselves are agents in an ongoing process of memory (re)construction, motivated by desire.”97 Along van Dijk’s lines, the pre-existing memories on the map affect those being uploaded. The meadowlark vignette, for example, prompts my recollection of the tiny coquí. My own memory of the coquí, in turn, is shaped by my desire to recollect it. The process by which one contributes to the memorial, then, mimics the performative recollection of memories, as well as the formation of a socially mediated, Internet-enabled collective memory. It is significant that the species are not the only agents at work, and the list spans the human and the nonhuman. Suburban sprawl, mechanized farming, pathogenic fungi—and elsewhere deforestation, toxic waste, natural disasters, and poaching—are implicated in the vanishing. Painting mass extinction with such a broad brushstroke allows us to reconsider the agents at play here: the Pope, Minnesota meadowlarks, mechanized farming, Kruger National Park, Humpback Whales, Bhopal, the Coquí, Easter Island, Golden Lion Tamarinds, the 2004 tsunami, pathogenic fungi. This litany reads like one of Bruno Latour’s famed lists, an ontographic technique later adopted by Graham Harman and described in detail by Ian Bogost in his 2012 book Alien Phenomenology. For Bogost, lists “offer an antidote to the obsession with Deleuzean becoming, a preference for continuity and smoothness instead of sequentiality and fitful-ness…the off-­ pitch sound of lists to the literary ear only emphasizes their real purpose: disjunction instead of flow.”98 If such lists are disjunctive, does this not disrupt the smooth continuity of Lin’s online memorial? Everything on the map is connected, after all, each dot or symbol comprising part of the aforementioned collective. This disjuncture goes against the Romantic wholeness of Nisbet’s Whole Earth assessment, and more towards a portrait of an incomplete system, as with Harman’s “everything is not connected.” The awkwardness in the list alludes to the hidden elements, the factors at work that we can neither categorize nor name. I contend that the disjunctures mapped by Bogost can work for What is Missing?, bringing into focus the gap between the smooth interconnectedness of the virtual landscape and the complicated, fragmented, and often contradictory nature of the physical realm. In Lin’s 97  José van Dijk, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age: Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 37–38. 98  Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What it’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 40.

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digital landscape, ruptures occur at the level of the list, the litany of names, species, and events implied in the map. As with the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial’s wall, the very act of naming signals the loss, the void, the disconnection between what is missing and what is left behind. Rachel Carson’s 1960s ecological mantra, that everything is connected and the collapse of one species can trigger a devastating chain reaction, is here spatialized. If we revisit What is Missing’s ties to the data-driven art of the mid-­ 1990s, the argument in favor of disjuncture is strengthened. According to Lev Manovich, the database “represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list…Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies.”99 Perhaps this is why the mini-narratives of What is Missing? sit uncomfortably, following their predetermined pattern, betraying their performative natures. Individually, they form distractions, ironically keeping the viewer from uncovering what truly is missing. What at first appears to be an incomplete memorial, a work forever in progress that fails to live up to its lofty aspirations, is in fact an opportunity to examine the coalescence of environmental thought. What is Missing?, rather than simply a surface treatment of lost biodiversity, brings together techno-­ utopianism and eco-philosophy into a productive, if unresolved dialogue. Within this digital landscape, we find a meditation on the archive, and an inquiry into how memories are processed and performed. What is Missing? bridges the gap between abstract ecological thinking and the practice of environmental art.

99  Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, ed. Victoria Vesna (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 44.

CHAPTER 3

Landscapes of Slow Violence

If the silences and disjunctures lying at the boundaries of What is Missing? hold the key to a more comprehensive understanding of art’s role in the environmental crisis, then it is incumbent upon viewers to dig deeper and excavate its gaps. Maya Lin’s vision of China, for example, is populated by a few key icons: a timeline of East Asian cranes, another timeline of Chinese conservation actions spanning 3000 BCE to 2014 CE, and disappearances of the soft-shelled turtle and the red panda. When narrowed down to personal stories, some stand out, including the extinction of the Baiji River Dolphin, the disappearance of fireflies, and the loss of wild mushrooms in Hunan Province. Of the memories uploaded to the map, only one is not in English, and for a nation of 1.38-billion people, the accounts are vastly underrepresented compared to the United States and Western Europe. Of course, the discrepancies can be easily explained: What is Missing? was initially a U.S.-based project, headed by Lin’s studio and exhibited widely in the West. Internet access in China, on the other hand, is notoriously censored, with many residents resorting to VPN services to visit blocked sites from Google to Netflix. Even so, the memories that have been uploaded to the map all exhibit the same acute awareness of environmental loss, rampant pollution, and escalating urbanization featured throughout the memorial. What is Missing? also shies away from tackling issues of large-scale migration—whether of humans or nonhumans—that have become increasingly commonplace in a changing climate. For example, several studies focusing on non-migratory butterflies in Europe tracked a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. N. Sheren, Border Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1_3

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significant weather-related southward shift in their range.1 In other circles, scientists and conservationists alike debate the utility of physically relocating animal and insect populations to areas with more favorable conditions.2 This approach, however, is not without its pitfalls, as the relocated species may not thrive in their new region or, perhaps more problematic, they may thrive all too well, to the point of being labeled invasive. Climate change also increases the territory of certain species, causing them to proliferate with far-ranging effects on the health of established ecosystems. Scientists have correlated the spread of mosquitos to an increase in the incidence of certain pathogens.3 Notably, in 2016, concerns of the spread of the Zika virus prompted reflections on the enlarged territory of the Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti mosquitos in the United States.4 Of course, stories of human relocation due to climate change tend to garner the most attention. Vulnerable populations in the Maldives, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and other Pacific Islands frequently become the subject of well-­ meaning human-interest stories, political theater, and artistic interventions. The impending crisis of climate refugees clashes with the rhetoric surrounding political refugees, particularly the United States and parts of Western Europe, leading the media to separate out narratives of “good” and “bad” refugees.5 In Decolonizing Nature (2016), art historian T.J. Demos describes how photographers including the Argos Collective and Subhankar Banerjee have worked to represent climate refugees. Demos privileges a straightforward “objective” visualization as a kind of Hegelian synthesis between eco-art that offers practical solutions and a

1  See Parmesan, C., et al. “Poleward shifts in geographical ranges of butterfly species associated with regional warming,” Nature 399 (1999), 579–583. 2  For a legal perspective on the “assisted migration” debate, see Alejandro E. Camacho, “Assisted Migration: Redefining Nature and Natural Resource Law under Climate Change,” Yale Journal on Regulation 27 (2010), 171–255. 3  See Epstein, P., et al. “Biological and physical signs of climate change: focus on mosquito borne diseases,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 79 (1998), 409–417. 4  For 2016 maps showing the extent of each species’ range, see https://www.cdc.gov/ zika/vector/range.html. 5  For more information on this categorization, see Marta Szczepanik, “The ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’” Refugees? Imagined Refugeehood(s) in the Media Coverage of the Migration Crisis” Journal of Identity and Migration Studies Vol 10, No. 2 (2016): 23–33. Note that Szczepanik only deals with the Syrian refugee crisis, but her study of media rhetoric applies to climate refugees as well.

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more ironic gallery-based neo-conceptualism.6 He decries the political rhetoric surrounding climate refugees, which emphasizes their victimhood.7 Instead, Demos believes Banerjee locates “First Nations peoples and nonhuman nature alike” within “political, ecological, and aesthetic constellations” that account for different forms of agency.8 While Demos’s decolonizing framework raises concerns about the production and reception of contemporary eco-art, Rob Nixon’s description of how “slow violence” exacerbates global inequality is worth revisiting here. According to Nixon, “slow violence” takes place “gradually and out of sight” and is “a violence of delayed destruction.” Unfortunately, this “attritional violence,” which is “dispersed across time and space,” is typically “not viewed as violence at all.”9 In Nixon’s formulation, the destruction wrought by “slow violence” is a product of the relentless pulse of development. Whether caused by the aftereffects of industrial accidents or the river-scale changes created by dam-building, modernization is both extractive and subtractive. For Nixon, the literary arts have an important role in revealing how “slow violence” functions in this process. More specifically, environmental activist-writers “can help us apprehend threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses, either because they are geographically remote, too vast or too minute in scale, or are played out across a time span that exceeds the instance of observation or even the physiological life of the human observer.”10 Nixon’s literary examples, such as Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People, use the passage of time to illustrate the drastically different effects of industrial development and climate change on economically vulnerable populations. In Sinha’s book, an unnamed disaster (which alludes to the December 1984 Union Carbide chemical leak in Bhopal, India) exerts long-term effects on the health of the local population. In fact, the novel argues that it is the lack of trust in the outside world that provides the most insidious aftereffect of the contamination. The mental toll of such violence is almost more damaging than the outward physical manifestations. To continue with the thread of the Bhopal disaster, it is the initial 6  T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), 55–58. 7  Ibid., 69. 8  Ibid., 93. 9  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2013), 2. 10  Ibid., 15.

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devastation, the “fast” violence that suffocated anywhere between 3800 and 16,000 people in the night, that grabs international headlines. Its effects ranged far beyond the typical news cycle, however, with a nearly decade-long escalation in respiratory illnesses, birth defects, and groundwater contamination continuing to plague the area’s inhabitants. Animal’s People looks at this longer duration, chronicling its fictional, parallel disaster nineteen years out and focusing on the narrative arc of a child permanently disfigured by the neurotoxins. Literary works such as Sinha’s, however, can direct the reader’s experience by foregoing ambiguity in favor of narrative cohesion. In this chapter I will argue that visual art, specifically contemporary digital photography, is equally equipped to register the temporal shifts required for presenting the effects of “slow violence” on marginal communities. Still photography, though temporally circumscribed, can imply extended duration and evoke timescales far beyond the conditions of its making. Visual art uses temporal and spatial ambiguity as a strategy that differentiates it from eco-critical literature and can allow the viewer to see “slow violence” in ways that move beyond narrative. In his formulation of the concept of “slow violence,” Nixon invokes the geographically unbounded and, therefore, imprecise term “poor” to describe those most affected by “slow violence.” In this chapter, I will use the broader category of the “Global South” to describe geographically and economically marginal populations that have been most affected by “slow violence.” This broader definition allows us to think spatially (Global South, East, and North) while also emphasizing the colonial origins of inequality in relation to the economic and societal shifts that occurred in the early twenty-first century. The term also acknowledges that the Global South is not uniformly poor and that landscapes of “slow violence” are primarily landscapes of extreme inequality. Although this chapter deals with examples from a range of sites, there is also no way to encompass the entirety of the “Global South” within the scope of this study. I aim to cover a diverse array of locations while not flattening the nature of lived experience and local knowledges. The concept of a “Global South” plagued by inequality and vulnerable to the effects of “slow violence” also addresses curator and art historian Gerardo Mosquera’s concern about the need to strengthen and develop “south-south” and “south-east” networks of circulation that reinforce economic and cultural solidarity among marginalized communities:

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Globalization has certainly improved communications to an extraordinary extent, has dynamized and pluralized cultural circulation, and has provided a more pluralist consciousness. Yet it has done so by following the very channels delineated by the economy, thus reproducing in good measure the structures of power. We are urged to undertake stronger efforts to establish and develop horizontal circuits, which will contribute to, pluralize and enrich culture, internationalizing it in the real sense, legitimizing it in their own terms, constructing new epistemes, unfolding alternative actions.11

The eco-art I consider here contributes to fostering these “horizontal circuits.” Placing these artworks in dialogue with each other engages a multi-relational understanding of eco-art, one that eschews traditional North-South hierarchies. There is no single way to depict the complexity of “slow violence.” In this chapter, the artworks I consider are linked by their mutual interest in upending established political, cultural, and economic hierarchies. By playing with scale, creating a sense of temporal ambiguity, or working toward destabilizing traditional eco-critical narratives, these artworks challenge documentary narrative strategies and make no special claims about truth-telling. However, in doing so, they engage what I identify as the problems of depicting “slow violence.” As Demos has warned, the victimization of climate refugees or the global poor can be a rhetorical trap for even the most well-intentioned artists. Instead, through different strategies that allow them to capture shifting temporal and physical scales, the photographers Yao Lu, Jiang Pengyi, and Gideon Mendel, and drone videographer Mitra Azar explore how to affectively and effectively impress these variations on viewers. This chapter is divided into three sections, each focusing on a different visual approach by these artists to what I term “landscapes of slow violence.” The Chinese artists Yao and Jiang, in their respective photographic series New Landscapes and Unregistered City, use digital manipulation and scalar disjunctures to reveal the violence of development. Sardinian-based nomadic artist Azar uses temporal ambiguity to portray depopulated landscapes torn asunder by political and ecological divisions in his Scars & Borders series. Finally, South African photographer Mendel’s portraits of flooded communities across the globe compel the viewer to question the dividing lines between Global North and Global South, as well as humans and nonhumans. 11   Gerardo Mosquera, “Walking with the Devil: Notes on Art, Culture, and Internationalization,” The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Latin American and Latino Art, eds. Robin Greeley and Alejandro Anreus (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). Also available online: http://www.gdmoa.org/zhanlan/threeyear/4/24/12/12374.jsp.

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New Landscapes and Unregistered Cities: Modernization and Development in Chinese Photography In order to study the connections between digital art, development, and tradition that evoke slow violence in contemporary China, I offer a dual case study of the work of Yao Lu and Jiang Pengyi. In Yao’s New Landscapes (2006–2010) and Jiang’s Unregistered Cities (2008–2010) digital manipulation is used to play with the concept of scale, both physical and temporal. In doing so, both series dislocate and disorient the viewer and expose the slow violence that is wrought by development and urbanization, as well as its exacerbation of preexisting inequalities. Mountain and Straw Houses in the Summer (2008) at first glance appears to be a painting rendered in a naturalistic landscape tradition.12 In it, high cliffs are shrouded in mist and rise above a layer of clouds. A gray-­ hued sky dominates the upper half of the composition, with the green peaks breaking the horizon. The image’s serenity and timelessness creates a sense of vast scale, while in the foreground, a small temple perches on a rocky outcrop. Like Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) Chinese landscapes or those of the Japanese master Hokusai (1760–1849), two of Yao’s more overt historical references, the image alludes to the harmonic relationship between spirituality and nature idealized by the Buddhist tradition. The title recalls the descriptive naming conventions of earlier Chinese landscapes and red stamps indicate authorship and provenance, the trappings of an imagined authenticity. The image’s rounded edges and oblong dimensions complete the effect. The shape appears to be a design for a fan that once hung in an ancient palace. Yet Mountain and Straw Houses in the Summer is a digital photograph manipulated to conceal certain aspects of the landscape while revealing others that emphasize the effects of development. Upon close inspection, the serene mountainscape and verdant hillside foliage is in fact heaps of garbage covered in green netting that is commonly found in construction zones to prevent erosion. These mountains are not “natural” in any sense of the word, but rather human-made aftereffects of urbanization and 12  This is only an estimate. Yao’s photographs are an amalgamation of different traditions and periods within the history of Chinese landscape and genre painting and should not be viewed as evocations of a single specific era. I have chosen to highlight some similarities to the Qing-era landscapes, but this is by no means the sole association.

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industrialization. The foreground surrounding the temple is also made of debris, a combination of discarded building materials, and trash. The serenity of the historical landscape gives way to the violent consequence of contemporary development. Yao’s Mountain and Straw Houses in the Summer captures the environmental cost of China’s economic boom. Mountain and Straw Houses in the Summer is part of the larger New Landscapes series composed of twenty photographs. The specific frame shape is repeated in Early Spring on Lake Dongting (2008), which could easily serve as a counterpart to Mountain and Straw Houses in the Summer. In this second image, the green nets dominate the foreground and left side, while an expanse of water, presumably Lake Dongting, creeps in from the right. The composition resembles that of Mountain and Straw Houses, but with a slightly altered color palette. Lake Dongting, located in Hunan Province, is part of the Yangtze River flood basin. Formerly Hunan’s largest lake, seventy years’ worth of agricultural land reclamation practices resulted in the shrinkage of its surface area by almost 50 percent.13 Ecologists have determined that the decline of the lake has led to extreme environmental consequences, including the disappearance of the Baiji River Dolphin from its watershed.14 In this series, Yao Lu uses different geometric frames, including the circle, as in Overlapping Waves and Lush Trees (2007), or the rectangle, as in Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Yu (2008). This latter example employs a horizontally oriented rectangle with an aspect ratio of 2.5 to 1. In other words, it is slightly more elongated than a standard landscape format. The composition is typical of Yao’s series, where mountains topped with various small structures encroach on a body of water, the entire scene frequently shrouded in a gray mist. The overall effect, as in most of his pictures, is one of a floating landscape mysteriously unmoored from the earth. The “Mount Yu” of the title has many possible references, but here may allude to the “Jade Mountain” of Chinese mythology. Yao’s title does not distinguish between the mythical “Yu” and its physical counterparts in China and Taiwan. The ambiguity is deliberate, as it extends the mashup of styles, genres, and historical periods referenced throughout Yao’s New Landscapes. Furthermore, Yao’s allusion to myth sharply underscores the 13  Zhao et al. “The 7-Decade Degradation of a Large Freshwater Lake in Central Yangtze River, China,” Environmental Science & Technology 2005 39 (2), 431–436. 14  Ibid. Note that the decline of the Baiji Dolphin population was one of the Chinese memories recorded in What is Missing?

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contrast between the reverence for the natural world typical in traditional Chinese landscape painting and the realities of industrial and agricultural development upon the earth. Yao’s New Landscapes are both contemporary and ancient, real and imaginary. They confront the viewer with a storied past and a destructive present. The series’ repetition creates familiarity, and viewers become primed to search for the evidence of digital manipulation. Black tarps poke through snow or grass-covered landscapes, and mist obscures the detritus of industrial development, a consequence of a rampantly rising urban population. In Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Yu in particular, the play with scale, the juxtaposition of small and large, close and distant, is evident in the details. In one telling example, along the horizon there appears to be a small factory smokestack that is perched on top of a mountain, in a site more commonly reserved for a temple or shrine. At the foot of that same mountain, trash flows toward the water’s edge, including discarded plastic bags. New Landscapes develops an aesthetic of layering what philosopher Michel Serres terms “sensory garbage,”15 as the sacred landscape overlaps with the historical one, which in turn gives way to the contemporary “dumping ground.” Yao’s photographs shift among these differing modes of landscape, leading the viewer to negotiate among them. The three modes of representing landscape—sacred, historical, and contemporary—found in Yao’s series parallel the three histories described by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty writes of the collision of “three histories” that are typically “treated as processes separate from one another” which include “the history of the earth system, the history of life … and the more recent history of industrial civilization.”16 The issue of differing timescales, and, accordingly, the disjuncture which enables slow violence to occur, is a function of the overlap of these historical modes. Chakrabarty goes on to describe how

15  The full quote is as follows, and I find it resonates with Yao’s series as a whole: “How have divine landscapes, the saintly mountain and the sea with the innumerable smiles of the gods, how have they been transformed into sewage farms or horrifying dumping grounds for corpses? By scattering material and sensory garbage, we are covering or erasing the world’s beauty and reducing the luxurious proliferation of its multiplicities to the desert and solar uniformity of our laws alone.” Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, Trans. Elisabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 24. 16  Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41 (2014), 1.

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[h]umans now unintentionally straddle these three histories that operate on different scales and at different speeds. The very language through which we speak of the climate crisis is shot through with this problem of human and in- or nonhuman scales of time.17

Slow violence is enabled and overlooked, then, because of the supposed separation between these differing scales of time and conceptions of history. Their actual overlap, as Chakrabarty points out, results in a failure of human language to comprehend the magnitude of environmental crisis. This, I argue, is where photography, and digital media more broadly, can make a contribution, offering a visual language where written words fail. The long duration of slow violence is difficult for a photograph to capture. Photography has typically excelled at portraying brief, instantaneous moments. How can it capture shifting timescales? In the aforementioned scalar disconnect between the factory and the garbage pile in Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Yu, we see how physical scales can come to stand in for temporal ones. It is impossible for viewers to reconcile Yao’s image as a whole once it is broken down into its constituent parts. In other words, if the viewer reads a portion of Yao’s image correctly as a landscape, then the smokestack topping the mountain peak is either far too small or the piles of garbage in the foreground far too large. The temple, alluding to sacred landscapes and human histories, exists uncomfortably in the same pictorial space as the detritus of industrial capital. Playing with scale in this way, then, the series insists on the overlap between these different ideas of landscape and narratives of history in a way that renders the temporal ambiguities of slow violence visible. Yao’s New Landscapes creates a digital portrait of Nixon’s “slow violence.” It is the interplay of vision and imagination, coupled with the shock of the reveal, that primes the viewer to read the effects and larger implications of the violence at hand. Once the world on display is proven false, this realization destabilizes everything in its wake. The solid ground upon which we stand turns to loosely gathered mounds of refuse. Rather than a faithful rendering of an untouched primordial “nature,” the landscape genre registers human desire and encodes it onto nonhuman entities. We can conceive of the Anthropocene, then, as the transformation from an Earth populated by humans into a human-altered landscape. Yao Lu’s New Landscapes captures this shift and is indicative of  Ibid.

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the slow violence it inflicts. What was at first a familiar genre, the traditional landscape, complete with the standard signs that point the viewer to the subject and its meaning, is suddenly overturned. The shock of the reveal encourages a questioning, as New Landscapes alerts us to the fact that behind every picturesque landscape there are socio-political forces that are invisible to the eye. The trash colonizing the once-pristine landscape represents human intervention on the land, correlated with the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Serres argues that such pollution is profoundly anthropocentric, for “that which surrounds man makes him into the center. … At the limits of growth, pollution is the sign of the world’s appropriation by the species.”18 This language, referencing “appropriation” and the idea of a center, reflects the terms used to describe the cultural dynamics of colonialism. As I mentioned briefly in the introduction, recent scholarship argues that the instantiation of humanity as a geological force, or the “Anthropocene,” dates (in some formulations) to the population shifts brought on by European colonization. Pollution, in Serres’s vision, is both anthropocentric and neocolonial, rewarding elites at the expense of the global poor. Pollution is never static, nor can it be contained. It has a spatial dimension that continuously spreads.19 It is a symptom and manifestation of the Anthropocene and therefore shorthand for human presence. The violence of colonialism, then, is not limited to that inflicted upon indigenous peoples; it includes the long-term alteration of climate and environment that would manifest centuries later as slow violence. While Yao Lu’s photography evokes the past to alert viewers to the present, Jiang Pengyi presents the viewer with an apocalyptic vision of Chinese urbanism. Like Yao’s New Landscapes, Jiang’s Unregistered City series (2008–2010) relies on digital manipulation to reveal that while the growth of cities is rapid, unprecedented, and linked to environmental degradation, the slow violence it inflicts is barely perceptible to the human eye. Unregistered City 2 (2008) summarizes the series’ themes. The space Jiang presents appears to be a corner of an abandoned interior. Faded green paint flakes off the walls, while a large hole occupies a space just to the left of where the two walls join. On the floor, however, stranger things come into view. Amid the cracked concrete floor strewn with dust and 18  Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution?, trans Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 53. 19  Ibid., 50.

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debris sprout tiny high-rise buildings, elevated highways, and the beginnings of an overall infrastructure. This urban scene seems fully organic to the space from which it sprouts, as the buildings are coated in the same dusty hue as the floor itself. The interior space reflects neglect and abandonment, while the miniature urban landscape alludes to narratives of progress and the rapid influx of global capital into a Chinese city. The confluence of the two modes—decay and development—captures competing temporalities and physical scales. As viewers approach the scene from an elevated perspective looking down into the corner, it becomes apparent that the viewer exists within the scale of the decrepit room. The shifts in scale in Jiang’s scene place viewers in the position of displacement and the uncanny. We are too far removed to see the inhabitants of the tiny city, but we can envision their lives and their commute from one sector to another. A second image, Unregistered City #8 (2008), brings in the notion of precariousness. A tiled interior shelf, perhaps part of a kitchen or bathroom, sags and cracks under the weight of assorted rubble and shards of mirrored glass. Just below, a dark void threatens to consume the contents of the shelf. The glass fragments’ sharp, jagged edges point upwards, a series of craggy peaks that give a sense of foreboding and overall danger. Reflected in the glass, however, is a skyline, or fragments of what could be a number of skylines. In some shards viewers can discern an expanse of blue sky, a river, high-rise buildings, and a generic urban center. The Eiffel Tower even makes an appearance in a single shard, roughly centered and positioned to reflect directly back on to the viewer.20 The effect here is twofold: the fragments may at first reflect an optimistic vision of urban expansion. In this view, the hidden potential of the debris reflects an alternate or future timeline, one with clear skies and gleaming towers. On the other hand, the precariousness of the fragments’ positioning undermines any optimistic reading; the shelf appears to be breaking, while Jiang’s photograph captures the rubble mid-slide. Those glass shards with their reflected urban scene will soon fall through the cracks and into the dark space below. Upon further investigation, viewers find that the entire composition is too unstable to be indicative of reality; it is either in motion or the scene is manipulated even more than it appeared at first. 20  Recall Mestaoui’s use of the Eiffel Tower as canvas for her digital projection in Chap. 2. The tower’s initial purpose in radio broadcasting becomes relevant here, as artists use its iconic shape to amplify their own communications.

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The series’ title, Unregistered City, alludes to the rapidly shifting urban landscape of contemporary Beijing. Jiang stages these photographs inside abandoned buildings, extending the juxtaposition of past, present, and future—those overlapping temporalities leading to an uneasy coexistence within the frame. Abandoned buildings are a necessary byproduct of urban expansion, and Jiang’s series portrays them as part of a life cycle. The state of abandonment and decay is itself temporary, soon to be razed and built anew. The glass shards of Unregistered City #8 reflect a potential future, but at the same time allude to the fact that these gleaming towers will one day be left to decay. This urban life cycle opens a discussion of timescales beyond human experience and leads to a questioning of the effects of development in light of this longer historical trajectory. In Jiang’s images, construction and destruction are two sides of the same coin, and the scalar disjuncture—the miniature city rising out of the rubble—operates in a similar manner as those found throughout Yao Lu’s New Landscapes. The play on scale and the multiplicity of temporalities once again allude to those inherent to slow violence. Jiang’s gritty Beijing and Yao’s mythical landscapes are each symptomatic of the ongoing tensions between environmentalism and development. The term “development” merits further scrutiny, for although the classifications of underdeveloped/developing/developed nations have largely fallen out of fashion in twenty-first-century discourse, the global development project has had lasting effects. Economist Gilbert Rist defined the term as consisting of “a set of practices” which require “the general transformation and destruction of the natural environment and of social relations” in order to reproduce society.21 It is crucial to note that Rist considers the “destruction of the natural environment” to be an integral component of the term’s definition. Planned development, laid out for the first time politically in Harry Truman’s 1949 Inaugural Address, began as an anti-colonial measure, in keeping with the decolonial program of the postwar era. The systematic approach to global economic modernization nonetheless reproduced paternalistic attitudes to what were termed “underdeveloped” former colonies. Rist notes how the term ­“‘[u]nderdevelopment’ appears to exist without a cause, as a state of ‘poverty’ that is a ‘handicap’ and produces ‘victims’ oppressed by ‘hunger, disease, and

21  Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Zed Books, 1997), 13.

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despair.’”22 In this formulation, no thought is given to colonial and imperial origins of this “underdevelopment,” nor the continued exploitation of labor and natural resources that benefits the global rich at the expense of the global poor. Perhaps it is geographer David Harvey’s theory of development which best accounts for the production (and re-production) of global inequality. Harvey describes “accumulation by dispossession”23 as the key feature of neoliberal thinking that is prevalent in state-run economies, such as China’s. The consolidation of land rights to individuals followed what Harvey terms “primitive accumulation,” in which leaders “frequently assumed de facto property rights to communal land and assets in negotiations with foreign investors and these rights were later confirmed as belonging to them as individuals.”24 Combined with massive state-run infrastructural projects such as the Three Gorges Dam (which itself displaced millions), and the urban transformations of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the scale of dispossession in China since the late 1970s has been unprecedented. The green netting on Yao’s hillsides, then, is not just an aesthetic blight, but an indication of the “accumulation by dispossession” that Harvey elucidates. The same can be said for Jiang’s miniature cities rising out of derelict spaces. The eye may be drawn to the incongruity of the tiny buildings, but the setting of each image points to that which is lost amid the relentless churn of development. The lack of human figures in both series, however, allows the viewer to think not in terms of victimhood, but of those larger structural forces at work. Although for Rist and Harvey development entails environmental destruction, the idea of “sustainable” development dates to the late 1980s, when the World Commission on Environment and Development published a report titled Our Common Future (1987). The report identified the concept of sustainability as imposing “not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities.”25 The authors, however, failed to identify  Ibid., 76.  Harvey uses this phrase throughout his work, particularly Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (Verso, 2006). 24  David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (Verso, 2006), 39. 25  Brundtland, quoted in Rist, 181. Global efforts followed, inaugurating the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in June 1992, a global initiative that would become the forerunner to “innovation-focused” events such as the COP 21 summit in Paris in 2015. 22 23

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the deeply rooted conflict of interest between sustainability and development. Namely, as Rist describes the conflict, that “[w]hereas one aim of environmentalists is to promote a diachronic view of resource use (by protecting the rights of future generations), market price responds only to effective demand expressed here and now, in complete abstraction from long-term effects.”26 This inability to reconcile the different timescales of the market and the environment has continued to reproduce itself, and we can see its echoes in the temporal and scalar disconnects of both New Landscapes and Unregistered Cities. Both series capture the impossibility of a truly sustainable development, revealing the inherent instability of such rhetoric.

Ambience and the Drone Aesthetic in Mitra Azar’s Scars & Borders While the specter of development conjures up visions of monstrous urbanization in China, other artists across the globe explore the visual signs of financial, environmental, and geopolitical divides. These lines leave palpable traces upon the earth, although not always in the most accessible of places. In their most spectacular form, such divides create an alien landscape, one both marked by humanity but seemingly devoid of its presence. Artist and videographer Mitra Azar’s series Scars & Borders (2016–present) visualizes this contradiction between human absence through presence using drone footage to document uncanny spaces. Throughout this series, Azar links the scars and borders of the geopolitical periphery, drawing connections between disparate regions. The hulking structures of the Sardinian bauxite mine and the stratified beach landscape that I will analyze in this chapter are in dialogue with other films in the series, including footage of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, refugee camps, and Navajo reservations. The use of the drone in two separate vignettes from Scars & Borders, Bauxite Pool (2016) and Raouché and Dalieh (2016) creates an eco-critical aesthetic that disturbs temporalities and alludes to timescales beyond that of the human, visualizing the “slow” in slow violence. Azar utilizes the drone as a practical tool, for many of the spaces depicted in the series are not open for public access. This notion of the drone providing unmitigated access to closed-off territories is one that artists have mined, commenting on the tension between drone as  Rist, 187.

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top-­down surveillance technology versus the bottom-up sousveillance, or a means to surveil those in power. In work by Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl, among others, the constant play of visibility—of seeing and being seen—raises concerns of larger governmental and security implications. Throughout Paglen’s photographic series (Untitled) Drones (2010), shots of predator and reaper drones against the sky emphasize the technology’s alien remoteness as well as its omnipresence. Steyerl’s video How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic .MOV File (2013), on the other hand, gives viewers the tools to counter such surveillance and remain invisible to the electronic eye. Azar’s use of the drone, then, must be seen as part of this larger critique of accessibility, visibility, and power. Aside from the practical reasons for filming from a drone, I argue that the specific motion and sounds of the remote-controlled machine produce an overall aesthetic of ambience. Timothy Morton characterizes ambience as open, unintentional, and transitory,27 containing “unfulfilled promises of a world without boundaries, a de-aestheticized but nevertheless perceptually vivid world.”28 I would add that ambience forms an immersive aesthetic of the uncanny, sitting uncomfortably in the gap between human and machine, the natural and the unnatural, complicating and undoing those pre-established binaries. Within Morton’s analysis, ambience has both the potential to mitigate the distancing effect of the romantic sublime and the potential to succumb to its pitfalls.29 In the case of Azar’s drone footage, the physical dislocation between operator and drone allows Azar to generate that ambience without succumbing to the pitfalls of the sublime. Through the hovering visuals and the drone-inspired soundtrack, the viewer is perpetually aware of the mediating influence of technology and the piece never aesthetically overwhelms. By using a drone-enabled aesthetic of ambience, coupled with ambiguities of temporal and physical scales, Azar tackles the challenge of depicting slow violence. Ceding ­control to the drone, Azar accords it a certain agentive capacity, bringing the postcolonial eco-criticism of Nixon’s concept into dialogue with posthuman and new materialist ontologies. For the six-minute video Bauxite Pool, Azar films an open pit mine in northwest Sardinia. He presents viewers with an environmental film that relies upon ambience and temporo-spatial ambiguity for its affective  Morton, 2007, 140–142.  Ibid., 164. 29  Ibid., 142. 27 28

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register rather than the narrative didacticism of mainstream documentary. Bauxite is the world’s main source of aluminum, which is produced primarily in Australia, China, Brazil, and India. Frequently open or strip mined, the process is condemned as environmentally devastating. In the case of Malaysia, the government repeatedly extended an initial three-­ month ban on the practice due to widespread water contamination.30 Aside from its role in aluminum production, other uses for the mineral include hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Bauxite is one possible component of “frac sand,” which props open the fractures after the initial pumping.31 Through direct and indirect means, bauxite mining, seemingly in service of a material as benign as aluminum, is implicated in much larger discourses of environmental destruction. The choice to film a Sardinian mine, rather than one in India, Brazil, or another major producer, stems from Azar’s own background. Although he self-identifies as a “nomadic” artist, Azar is originally from Sardinia, and returned there to defamiliarize the familiar. Northwest Sardinia’s Nurra region began to develop large-­ scale bauxite mining in the 1980s and 1990s.32 Sardinia has a millennia-­ long history of mining, one closely tied to the island’s identity. Studies have linked the activity to higher than average concentrations of silver, barium, cadmium, chromium, copper, manganese, antimony, zinc, and lead in the hair of children living in historical mining villages. 33 The opening shot fades in on the bauxite mine itself, contrasting the red dirt against a verdant countryside. Cylindrical towers dominate the composition, along with an entanglement of pipes and scaffolding, connecting overhead walkways, and other, unidentifiable structures. With scan after scan, the viewer begins to see the logic in the layout, in the rows and rows of identical forms that comprise the mine’s processing center. Smokestacks in the distance appear to mark the extent of the territory, but 30  “Malaysia extends bauxite mining ban until mid-2017,” Reuters, March 27, 2017. Online. http://www.reuters.com/article/malaysia-bauxite-idUSL3N1H51L0. Accessed May 15, 2017. 31  For a review of the uses of bauxite and other so-called proppants, see Liang et al., “A comprehensive review on proppant technologies” Petroleum vol. 2, no. 1 (March 2016): 26–39. 32  Mameli et al., “Geological, Geochemical and Mineralogical Features of Some Bauxite Deposits from Nurra (Western Sardinia, Italy): Insights on Conditions of Formation and Parental Affinity,” International Journal of Earth Science 96 (2007), 891. 33  Varrica et  al., “Metals and Metalloids in Hair Samples of Children Living Near the Abandoned Mine Sites of Sulcis-Inglesiente (Sardinia, Italy),” Environmental Research 134 (2014), 373.

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the mine’s full size is undetermined. The surrounding landscape hints at the life beyond the complex, with an expanse of greenery ending in a line of hazy mountains. In the far distance, a few wind turbines rotate slowly, perhaps an intentional allusion to a radically different form of energy, one that avoids the extractive capacity of the mine. Azar’s powerful visuals are dependent on an accompanying auditory ambience. In Bauxite Pool, sound creates an element of narrative. We first hear the faint beeping of Morse code, and the elemental clink of something metallic, perhaps the machinery of the plant below. All the while, a pulsing lower register evokes mechanical life: an artificial, unchanging beat. That unmistakable mechanical pulse contrasts with the stillness of the frame, but belies a potential energy hidden within the mine. It is as if the mine itself is alive—from the red pits to the web of scaffolding, the smokestacks, and the cylindrical towers. Halfway through the piece, the sound of the drone takes over, giving sonic evidence of the video’s making. Rather than interrupt the symphony of ambience, the drone vibration intensifies the auditory track. At the end of the film, a chorus of echoes layers in as the shot pulls backward and up to the sky. The final fade out seems both appropriate and anticlimactic; the vision is over before we can truly reconcile what we have been shown. The sonic ambience of the piece is predicated on the entanglement and conflation of human and nonhuman enabled by the use of the drone. Stillness contributes to the sense of ambience as well. Purposefully upending viewers’ expectations of the still image versus the moving image, the two become almost interchangeable in Bauxite Pool. Motion is confined to the drone, which pulls in and out from the scene, scanning the environment in an almost clinical manner. The superstructures of industry, all tinged with bauxite red, can be interpreted as pure forms, as if comprising the abstract lines of an early twentieth-century avant-garde artwork. That insistence on angular geometry might evoke a Constructivist dream, but is instead devoid of the earlier movement’s devotion to dynamism and frenetic motion. While the still photography of Jiang Pengyi and Yao Lu depended upon the motion of the reveal, subverting stillness through duration and in doing so visualizing slow violence, Azar’s moving images appear to be both frozen and alluding to a longer timespan. Bauxite Pool appears to pan within a single moment in time. Paradoxically, that stillness also implies a far-longer duration, a vision of a world devoid of human presence. The stillness of the Bauxite Pool portends a quiet sense of disaster, foreshadowing events yet to come or depicting a post-apocalyptic

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aftermath. It leads the viewer to question where the workers have gone, whether the mine is still functional, and what, if anything, will happen next. Azar’s conflation of panorama and the cinematic comprises what Alexander Streitberger has termed the “photofilmic,” an intermedial mode of image-making borrowing visual language from both cinema and still photography. In Streitberger’s study of the digital panorama, he likens it to the “totalized space of the gesamtkunstwerk”34 and notes that it “contains imbricated representational and perceptual temporalities, which are concealed by the simulation of an overwhelming, totalized experience in the service of ideological, political, and economic aims,” resulting in a “paradox of spatial continuity and temporal divergence.”35 That cinematic quality in Bauxite Pool is an intentional one, for Azar’s piece is an extended play on the trope of the establishing shot. Traditionally, such images give context, showing the exterior of a structure before the action heads inside, for example, panning along an urban skyline. Establishing shots have no set temporality, being primarily spatial indicators. In the case of Bauxite Pool, the drone video is only establishment, with no real entrance into the space. The viewer is set up to expect further explorations, but instead remains on the precipice between arrival and entrance, suspended in time. The video of Azar’s that is most closely in dialogue with the Sardinian mine is based on drone footage of Beirut. This piece, titled Raouché & Dalieh, nearly five minutes long, begins with yet another establishing shot, pulling backward over the city’s coast. The title refers to the specific location depicted—the oceanfront neighborhoods of Raouché and Dalieh. Initially, time and direction are called into question, as it becomes unclear whether the drone is moving backward across the scene, or if the footage has been reversed after the fact. No motion on the ground gives a clue until later in the piece. As with the bauxite mine, Azar slowly reveals the strangeness of the landscape, its high-rise condos, and an eerie forest of concrete barriers. The shape of each barrier resembles an uppercase “I” from the side, and an “X” or a cross from above. Azar revels in the oddity of the forms, their geometric regularity forming a counterpart to the rugged cliffs of the Dalieh shoreline. On their own, they harken back to Land Art or a kind of modern Stonehenge. The drone pans closely over this 34  Alexander Streitberger, “Futures Past: Imbricated Temporalities in Contemporary Panoramic Video Art,” The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Brianne Cohen and Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2016), 46. 35  Ibid., 49.

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geometric forest of abandoned concrete, while the audio plays the same mechanically tinged soundtrack as in the Bauxite mine piece. Azar’s videography is here primarily a play on scale rather than temporality. Unlike Bauxite Pool, this clip presents the viewer with something unfamiliar, and we are given few clues as to the size of these barriers until the drone pulls back to show diminutive human figures making their way through the concrete forest. This stretch of coastline marks a border between public and private space. Azar has referred to this scene as representing “striated space,” or a space of the state, in which the law controls human movement.36 On one side exists publicly accessible oceanfront property, while further inland, the gleaming high-rises amass. Their towering forms may recall Jiang’s Unregistered City as unmistakable signs of development. The concrete barriers, then, occupy a no-man’s land, a zone of contention that ordinary Beirut-dwellers must navigate in order to claim their right to the coast. As mentioned earlier, the video’s title refers to the Raouché and Dalieh areas of West Beirut. The Raouché neighborhood is home to the Pigeon Rock landmark just off the shore and it comprises one of the most sought-after oceanfront views. The Dalieh shoreline has both geological and prehistorical significance, containing a neolithic site listed by the World Monuments Fund. Together, both coastal areas play with the idea of shifting timescales, from the ancient and prehistoric to the accelerated pace of contemporary real estate development. According to the nonprofit Reclaim the Sea (www.reclaimthesea.org), private developers have begun agitating for a land reclamation process that will add 800,000 sq. m. to the area, most of it valuable oceanfront property. The process of land reclamation is itself temporally disconcerting, as it purports to reverse the entropic actions of millennia. On a practical level, such endeavors disrupt coastal ecosystems and compromise the habitats of highly specialized organisms. This action sets up a conflict between public and private, and in these terms, the concrete forest of the transition zone takes on an added significance. Azar’s fascination with the geometric regularity and the uncanny aesthetic qualities of this space must be read in light of this longer history of human intervention as well as geological time. Once again, the

36  Mitra Azar, “Anecdotes of life and aphorisms of thought” Talk given at Mutating Ecologies in Contemporary Art, 1st International Symposium. Barcelona, Spain. December 1, 2016.

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temporal disconnects of economic development and environmental sustainability come to the fore. Both Bauxite Mine and Dalieh & Raouché present the viewer with shifting timescales in order to call attention to the durational quality of slow violence, its slippage under the radar and beyond the detection of human vision. Terry Smith has written extensively on the issue of time and temporality in contemporary art, stating that “the thickening present is pierced by prodigious contemporizings of past times, layered by uneven and inequitable distribution of possible presents, and haunted by incompatible expectations of times to come.”37 All of the timescales in Smith’s assessment are incongruous, indicating a larger preoccupation with destabilizing chronology. Azar’s videos, seen in this light, seek to disturb viewers’ sense of linearity and progression. That “inequitable distribution of possible presents,” after all, is one consequence of slow violence. In the case of the Sardinian scene, temporal disconnects disorient the viewer and denaturalize the machinery of extraction. The drone footage of Beirut plays with physical scale as well as temporality, calling attention to the artificial divide within the landscape and prompting further investigation into the nature of development and land reclamation policies. In each of these cases, the use of the drone and its immediate detachment from the human enables this destabilizing of temporality. Although Azar operates the drone, the physical and visual disconnect between the two leads to the machine taking on a life, and therefore agency, of its own. Bolette B. Blaagaard cites the “online connection—between the audience and the images” and “between the drone (technology) and the operator”—that results in a lack of closeness.38 This remote connection has the potential, in many cases, to reduce the ethical and moral responsibility of the drone operator, a condition that underlies the use of drones as surveillance tools and weapons.39 Yet this disconnect can also imbue the machine with its own sensibility, as in Blaagaard’s idea of “posthuman photorealism,” composed of “a filmic reality” that is “supported by an organic-­ inorganic subjectivity that connects us to a technologically mediated 37  Terry Smith, “Cotemporality, Intermediality: Time and Medium in Contemporary Art” in The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Brianne Cohen and Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2016), 23. 38  Bolette B.  Blaagaard, “The Aesthetics of Posthuman Experience: The Presence of Journalistic, Citizen-generated and Drone Imagery,” Westminster Papers in Culture and Communication, 10(1) (2015), 60–61. 39  Ibid.

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self.”40 In Azar’s work and the accompanying soundtrack, viewers are immersed in such an “organic-inorganic subjectivity,” or the co-­authorship between artist and drone. This pairing of human and nonhuman is essential to the technological apparatus which undergirds the immersive realism and ambience of the films themselves. While Blaagaard labels the drone aesthetic “posthuman,” media theorist Mark Andrejevic investigates the linkage between the drone and the new materialist turn toward the nonhuman. He argues that drones form part of the shift toward affective computing, or “the attempt to imagine the devices with which we interact as increasingly ‘human.’”41 Operators view them as “communicative prostheses that can respond to a growing range of feelings, moods, and emotions.”42 This stands in contrast to Blaagaard’s earlier assessment of the “online connection,” rather than embodied one, between the drone, its operator, and the viewing audience. Whether through a posthuman shared subjectivity or a recognition of nonhuman agencies, it is clear that Azar relinquishes a degree of control to the technological apparatus. As a result, the viewer is continually aware of the world framed through the mechanical eye. The aesthetic of the drone engages multiple levels of discussion, including Nixon’s theorization of slow violence, Morton’s reclamation of ambience, and the new materialist recognition of nonhuman agencies.

Leveling Human and Nonhuman: Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World This chapter thus far has dealt with radically depopulated landscapes in which a built environment serves as a stand-in for human presence. Yao Lu’s, Jiang Pengyi’s, and Mitra Azar’s work communicates spatial and temporal ambiguities depicted in natural and constructed landscapes. South African-born artist Gideon Mendel’s project Drowning World (2007–present) veers between fine art and photojournalism, focusing on sites of water-based environmental disaster. The “drowning world” Mendel captures is global rather than confined to a single region. He eschews the horizontal landscape format in favor of the portrait  Ibid., 62.  Mark Andrejevic, “Becoming Drones: Smartphone Probes and Distributed Sensing,” Locative Media, ed. Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin (Routledge, 2015), 202. 42  Ibid. 40 41

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orientation, alternating between what he terms “Submerged Portraits,” which include depictions of human flood survivors, and “Floodlines,” that trace the high-water marks within dwellings and other built structures. Although Mendel never uses the term “landscape” to describe his work, I will argue that this series is necessarily reliant upon the landscape genre, in particular its engagement with eco-aesthetics and the visual rhetoric of new materialism. Mendel began working on Drowning World in 2007, after he photographed floods in both the United Kingdom and India that summer. He cites the “contrasting impacts of these floods, and the shared vulnerability that seemed to unite their victims”43 as the impetus for undertaking and continuing the project. The portrait Chinta and Samundri Davi, Salempur Village near Muzaffarpur is from a flood in India that occurred that year. Muzaffarpur and its rural surroundings, located in the largely agrarian state of Bihar, experience cyclical flooding due to their proximity to six major rivers and their location in the Indo-Gangetic flood plain. The August floods were considered a disaster, claiming over forty lives and affecting over ten-million people. In the prolonged aftermath, flood victims suffered from disease and starvation, not to mention the physical displacement caused by the rising waters. The portrait of the two women, Chinta and Samundri, presents a post-­ diluvian landscape. The women’s faces claim the focus, framed by brightly colored saris, their expressions are both resigned and stoic. If their expression fits the predetermined narrative of human resilience against the odds, then that rhetorical cliché is undermined by the surroundings. Water dominates the composition. It reaches the women’s chests and reflects in its mirrored surface an image of a world inverted. For these villagers and millions more like them, their lives, their homes, and their lands have been, figuratively and literally, turned upside down. The stability of the earth dissolves into the murky chaos of the floodwaters. The women’s bodies disappear beneath the surface, their saris now fabric anchors weighing them down. Although this is a still image, Mendel’s aesthetic here verges on the photofilmic, staging an eerie tableau vivant. It is clear from the composition that the women are not simply survivors, but are simultaneously used by Mendel to perform the role of flood victims. This performative quality allows the viewer a glimpse at the larger narrative, what 43  Gideon Mendel, submerged-portraits/.

Drowning

World,

online,

http://gideonmendel.com/

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theorist Agnes Petho describes in the photofilmic as “expanding the expressivity of the single, often decontextualized image.”44 It is this photofilmic quality of Drowning World that, I argue, brings the project into the fold of the landscape genre. As I discussed at the start of Chap. 2, landscape is uniquely equipped to tell the story of human involvement with the environment, as well as illustrate the social construction of “nature.” It is a mode of representation concerned not with visual mimesis, but with portraying the relationship between humans and the earth. This underlying concern is what ties together Romantic scenes of idealized “nature” (such as Samuel Finley Breese’s Niagara painting) or the digital environment memorialized by Maya Lin. In a photograph such as Mendel’s Chinta and Samundri Davi, what is being portrayed is not any particular individual quality of the women he captures, for they are performing a role. Instead, Mendel’s camera highlights an antagonistic yet mutually constitutive relationship to the land, a relationship that has been conditioned by societal, cultural, and physical factors. For Mendel, the floodwaters act as a leveling device and point of comparison between the Global South and the Global North—between developing regions and those more industrially established. The photographs of Drowning World reveal a more complex dynamic than this simple trope of leveling different human populations. Although the floodwaters themselves fail to discriminate between developed nations and developing ones, between wealthy regions and impoverished ones, between Global North and Global South, the aftermath of the events reveals and exacerbates those inequalities. Two months prior to the Bihar floods, the photographer had traveled to South Yorkshire, UK, to record the effects of historic flooding across parts of England and Northern Ireland. Within South Yorkshire, two deaths were recorded and 700 villagers were forced to evacuate. The scale of the disaster, while prompting some of the most focused and sustained relief efforts in UK history, was nowhere near that of Bihar’s flooding, and the UK did not experience the same outbreaks of disease and controversies of resource mismanagement that would occur in India. Mendel’s photograph Graham and Kieran Leith, Toll Bar Village depicts two Yorkshire villagers of the 700 evacuated from that year’s event. A father and son gather up documents and keepsakes from the remains of 44  Agnes Petho, “Figurations of the Photofilmic: Stillness versus Motion—Stillness in Motion,” The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Brianne Cohen and Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2016), 246.

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their flood-ravaged home, as the detritus of their lives floats around them. The indoor scene contrasts strongly with the outdoor landscape Mendel captured in Bihar. Here, the effect is one of claustrophobia—the pair is trapped in waist-high water and material possessions, objects crowd the frame, and all sense of the surroundings is lost. In this comparison between the Bihar and Yorkshire photographs, the non-Western women are more closely equated with “nature,” stereotyping their gender and national origin. Looking through Mendel’s series, I argue that although these associations are present in the 2007 images, Drowning World as a whole is more concerned with the effects of the floodwaters than with reinforcing preexisting stereotypes. The true work of the series is accomplished by setting images against each other to understand their points of contact and divergence. The following comparison illustrates this point. Joseph and Endurance Edem, with their children Godfreedom and Josephine, Igbogene, Bayelsa State, Nigeria shows a photograph from Bayelsa State, Nigeria, taken in 2012, while Jeff and Tracey Waters, Staines-upon-Thames, Surrey, UK was taken in Surrey, UK, 2014. The Nigerian family stands before a heavy iron gate, presumably that of their home, their bodies submerged to about hip-­ height. The family’s clothing is wet, stained, and the children are unprotected from whatever hazards may lurk underneath (and within) the murky water. The father is himself shirtless. In the image from Surrey, the couple is posed similarly in the front yard of their home. Their expressions echo the resignation seen in the Nigerian family, the Bihari women, and the South Yorkshire father and son. This couple, however, is dressed in matching waders and thick-knit sweaters; they seem prepared and consequently less displaced than the previous families. Contrasted with the thatched huts of the Bihari village women, this Surrey couple’s house is solid brick. The viewer assumes, correctly or not, that they will soon move past this ordeal and that their home can withstand the rising waters. Water is a focal point for discussions of the Anthropocene and human impact on global climate. As Nixon succinctly puts it, targeted resources sometimes don’t comply with neoliberal attempts to extract and commodify them.45 Chief among those targeted resources is water. According to Nixon, people in underdeveloped areas “can be rendered spectral uninhabitants whose territory may be cleared to stage the national theatrics of megadams and nuclear explosions,” performances which “mark the  Nixon, 21.

45

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‘developing’ nation’s ascent into modernity’s pantheon.”46 The “Submerged Portraits” of Mendel’s Drowning World depict the condition of being such a “spectral uninhabitant.” The human figures have their ghostly doubles beneath them, reflected in the water. Their condition of being, of inhabiting their villages, of securing their livelihoods, has been swept away by the rising waters. The flood acts biblically as a metaphor for death and rebirth, but in these portraits, it is unclear how (or if) that rebirth can occur. Mendel’s critique, one that acknowledges the universal human toll of the Anthropocene, while pointing a critical finger at its uneven global effects, comes across even when the human figures are absent from the frame. The “Floodlines” series allows the viewer to connect the dots from region to region, traversing all the established international and socio-­ economic boundaries. As he describes, these photographs record “the physical incursion of rising water by documenting the floodlines drawn through intimate living quarters, public spaces, and through landscapes turned liquid.”47 Accordingly, the focus for this sub-series is on objects and space, rather than staged human portraits. The viewer instead sees traces: traces of the human inhabitants, traces of the flood, and traces of the overarching forces at work. As with Jiang, Yao, and Azar, the physical evidence of humans is enough to stand in for bodily presence, and in many cases even magnifies the impact on the environment. Without the metaphorical weight of the human figure, encoded in politically charged subaltern bodies, the objects are free to testify after the fact. Such objects seek to resolve the ambiguity of performing victimhood versus having such roles thrust upon them from the outside. As with the “Submerged Portraits,” “Floodlines” comprises yet another non-traditional set of landscapes. Although they depict interior spaces, they stray from the conventions of the still life or genre scene. Due to the nature of the high-water marks, these compositions feature strong horizontal lines, many almost abstract in their starkness. The water lines, then, mimic the horizons of nineteenth-century Romantic landscapes or the abstractions of postwar Color Field Painting. Aside from this purely 46  Nixon, 165. China’s Three Gorges Dam, for example, led to the forced resettlement of more than 1.2 million people, turning in them into what Nixon evocatively termed “spectral uninhabitants.” Other nations, such as Thailand, have placed a moratorium on dam-­building, all the while actively constructing hydroelectric dams in neighboring countries. 47  Mendel, Drowning World, online, http://gideonmendel.com/floodlines/.

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formal consideration, the relationship depicted in the “Floodlines” is once again that of humans and the land—an exploration of the social and cultural connections brought about by the floodwaters’ leveling effects. For example, in The Home of Cheryl Towers, Toll Bar Village near Doncaster, UK, June 2007, Mendel presents one such interior scene. An analog clock occupies the upper portion of the frame, centered against a water-stained wallpaper backdrop. A horizontal line runs through the center of the composition, marking the extent of the flood and darkening the wallpaper below it. The floor appears still damp, covered in a thick slime of mud and other debris; the encroachment of the water is ever-present. Throughout the series, eerie juxtapositions come to the fore. The clock on Cheryl Towers’s wall enters into a dialogue with a different one, thousands of miles to the south in Nigeria. This image, labeled The Home of Godspower Kanz, Igbogene, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, November 2012, records a different wall, one adorned with a clock, calendar, and a woman’s portrait. While this group of objects gives us slightly more information about the home’s owner than the minimalist composition of The Home of Cheryl Towers, the photographs also engage each other on a formal level. Taken as a whole, this object-driven series charts a vast, global landscape of shared loss, memory, and mourning. The focus on objects generates a litany of flood victims: forlorn clocks, soggy curtains, bubbling wallpaper, discolored paint, stained concrete, abandoned entryways, waterlogged roses, a mud-encrusted telephone, and a submerged toilet, just to name a few. It is no coincidence that this recalls the ontographic technique of the list mentioned in Chap. 2, with its “off-pitch sound” to the “literary ear” emphasizing “disjunction instead of flow.”48 In the absence of the human figure and stripped of practical use, these objects are transformed into agents with their own inherent capacities. In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), political philosopher Jane Bennett recalls a constellation of objects which helped to form the basis for her notion of “vital materialism.” Upon seeing a glove, a mat of oak pollen, a dead rat, a plastic bottle cap, and a stick of wood in a storm drain grate in Baltimore, Bennett observed that “[a]s I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing—between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity … and, on the other hand, stuff that 48  Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or, What it’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 40.

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commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects.”49 Divorced from their context, these transformed objects take on new roles, brimming with as-yet-­untapped potential. As Bennett puts it, she “caught a glimpse of the energetic vitality inside each of these things.”50 Mendel’s lovingly photographed objects in the “Floodlines” take on a similar quality. Unlike the humans represented in the “Submerged Portraits,” the clocks in the UK and Nigeria are not stoic survivors, performing their roles as flood victims. They are not required to stand in for other subaltern bodies, nor do they carry the cultural and social markers of the postcolonial era of development. In Bennett’s sense, then, they manage to exist “in excess of their association with human meanings.” While Chinta and Samundri Davi are called to represent the countless global poor, bearing the brunt of the violence wrought by extractive technology, the telephone and the roses in Mendel’s image carry no such responsibility. Rather, they can record the material fact of the floods, their high-water marks, and lingering effects. Art historian Brianne Cohen’s recent assessment of eco-aesthetics argues that testimonies of nonhumans have “not supplanted but rather supplemented an earlier ‘era of the witness,’ with its narrative accounts often fraught with memory distortions, confusions, and gaps from the effects of trauma.”51 The objects in Mendel’s work, brimming with purported objectivity, can be read as such supplements to the human figures in the “Submerged Portraits.” Mendel does give us a specific provenance for the objects in “Floodlines,” and it is clear that the photographs are in dialogue with each other as well as with the people presented in the “Submerged Portraits.” Although Cohen calls such object testimonies “supplemental,” I would argue that in this case, Mendel’s focus on objects is substantive in its own right. Instead, the leveling effect of the floodwaters dismantles hierarchies not between ­ Global North and South, but between human and nonhuman.

49  Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 50  Bennett, 5. 51  Brianne Cohen, “Eco-aesthetics, Massacres, and the Photofilmic,” The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. Brianne Cohen and Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press, 2016), 65.

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Conclusions and New Questions It may seem, at this point, that this chapter has been building toward a new materialist solution to the problem of depicting slow violence. Such an approach would seem to avoid the two pitfalls mentioned at the start of this chapter—coping with the durationality of slow violence while resisting narratives of victimhood. Indeed, Morton’s championing of a de-­ Romanticized ambience and Bennett’s turn toward the world of “things” can enable connections between eco-art and decolonial theory. All of the series I have discussed thus far—New Landscapes, Unregistered Cities, Scars & Borders, and Drowning World—capture the complexity of slow violence without reducing it to a series of clichés. The construction sites and refuse piles of the digitally altered photographs, the high-water marks of the floodlines, and the slow drone pan through alien territories all speak to the push and pull of development, human rights, and environmental conservation. All four series present the viewer with a radically altered landscape within which the slow, insidious violence of the Anthropocene is revealed. The action of that reveal demands continued close examination. In the case of Yao Lu, the placid mountain scenes shift into piles of industrial refuse and debris of environmental extraction, and digital alteration exposes a new reality rather than obscuring it. The construction sites and refuse piles in New Landscapes and Unregistered Cities are equally indicative of the dynamic of Global South and Global North. After all, even the Eiffel Tower finds its way into latter series’ blighted cityscape. The problem is only exacerbated by the conditions of the developing world, regions in which rapid modernization is the key to economic growth, but that same modernization extracts an environmental toll. Mitra Azar works along similar lines, but adds in an element of ambience as seen through the detached mechanical eye of the drone. The disconnect between human operator and the agency of the drone itself grants the viewer an entirely new perspective on the landscapes, defamiliarizing the familiar and revealing the stratification of space. For Gideon Mendel, what is at first an uncanny staged image is revealed to be fact—an index of the floodwaters’ rise. The floods depicted by Mendel are the products of global climate change, dam-building, levee-ruptures, and river divergence that correlate with the acceleration of human intervention with the Earth. These artworks, in order to have the desired eco-critical effect, must work as part of larger series. A single image or video, while conveying a degree of

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information, cannot address the kind of broader connections that each series as a whole does. It is by reaching beyond a single circumstance, by making those South-South connections that Mosquera exhorts us to uncover, that these artworks give us a vocabulary with which to describe the ongoing violence of global inequality. All four series, digitally manipulated or not, play with the ideas of scale, interconnection, and reveal. This act of revealing, however, demands continued close examination. After all, once one identifies the tarps surrounding Yao Lu’s mountainscapes, one delves deeper, wondering what else has been overlooked. A similar line of thought pervades Mendel’s Drowning World, particularly the photograph of the two Bihari women. While the image strikes the viewer as a harsh reality, a straightforward depiction of the flood’s aftermath, I argue that one cannot escape the impulse to impose a narrative on the scene. Mendel, a South African, is nevertheless in a position of privilege as the globe-trotting artist moving from one location to another. His account of the floods is the one we privilege, rather than that of the women themselves. A closer look at the situation of the Bihar floodplain reveals that flooding in the region is both cyclical and necessary. In fact, shrinking Himalayan glaciers have led to drastic fluctuations in the amount of annual flooding, with some years bringing catastrophic drought, rather than the Biblical disasters from Mendel’s photographs. Such unpredictability has led to shrinking crop yields and a decrease in overall agricultural quality. On the other hand, the 2007 flood in Mendel’s photograph was not even the worst in recent memory, depending on location and other metrics. A more thorough analysis of Bihar, its agriculture, and its cyclical flooding could reveal any number of trends, contrasting and supporting each other, that each paints a different landscape of slow violence. In this sense, then, Mendel’s approach doesn’t reduce the world of the floods to the status of discrete yet connected objects; it maintains those objects in relation to a viewing subject. In order to connect the Bihari women, the Nigerian family, the clock in Doncaster, and the many other denizens of the Drowning World, the viewer must necessarily make assumptions about their economic, social, and even political status. This is not, then, a world fully populated by objects, but instead a kind of diorama, a slice of life in the Anthropocene, packaged and presented to a presumed outsider. If there is a danger, then, of artists embracing certain lines of new materialist thought, it falls along these lines. Objects, things, and other nonhumans are not entirely free from the burden of representation, nor

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can they escape our impulse to impose a narrative in the absence of one that is clearly defined. The cinematic staging of Azar’s videos and Mendel’s still images, that photofilmic quality mentioned earlier, blends fact with fiction. The result is a zone of ambiguity that makes for compelling visual art, but at the risk of privileging the experience of the viewer over that of the people and regions being represented.

CHAPTER 4

Entanglements

My analysis of Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World (2007–present) has demonstrated that it is incumbent upon artists to foreground global concerns about the environment while taking into account local knowledges, social mores, and the often-conflicting pressures of culture. The larger narratives Mendel fashions through his series are important ones, but they reassert a reliance upon interconnectivity. It helps to recall Graham Harman’s critique quoted at the start of this book.1 If, as Harman argues, everything is not connected, then it is instead the gaps in the map that are primed to give real insight into the relationship between the material world and the discourses that constitute it. Only when viewing Mendel’s photograph of Bihari women in light of local insights about the nature of floods can we perceive how the image shifts from a simple commentary on climate change to an image that captures inequality and the need for climate justice (these women rely on an increasingly destructive force for their very livelihood). Border ecology reframes the conversation about the means by which images, video, and interactive art enable such a critical shift in thinking.

1  See Graham Harman “Everything is not Connected.” Keynote lecture at In/compatible systems conference, February 2, 2012. Online: https://transmediale.de/content/keynote-­ everything-­is-not-connected-by-graham-harman. Also Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin, 2018).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. N. Sheren, Border Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1_4

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Karen Barad’s agential realism provides a methodological scaffolding for this border ecology.2 Briefly, Barad considers the material and the discursive realms as entangled with one another in a way that is mutually constitutive and diffractive.3 New materialism, as proposed by Harman, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett, asserts the independent agency of the material forces that shape the world, our decisions, and our existence. Barad’s agential realism pushes further, and asks how the discourse surrounding objects shapes how we discuss them, and how that discourse constitutes them in turn. In regards to the Global South, the discourse about objects is tied to the legacies of colonialism and the decolonial program, the unequal pace of development, and the disconnects and overlaps between tradition and modernity. Reading such social dynamics through the material (and vice versa) can seem abstract. Here I will focus on Manthan (2015) (Fig. 4.1), a video short by Indian artist Vibha Galhotra, in order to ground this theoretical approach in a single artwork. In Manthan, Galhotra commemorates the Yamuna River by revealing its paradoxical status as a holy entity and as a dumping ground for toxic material. The film portrays the river, choked by pollution, as a martyr, and

Fig. 4.1  Vibha Galhotra, Manthan (2015). Stills from digital video 2  Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007). 3  Barad, 88.

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links it to a deeper mythology about sacrifice. The video opens with a series of scenes showing the river in a dreamlike state. Hazy views of its banks are intercut with scenes of industrial structures reflected in the Yamuna’s mirrored surface. These initial shots frame the river as both a geographic landmark and an active participant in placemaking. The river reflects its surroundings, in doing so amplifying human presence, doubling the signs of industry. These early scenes dissolve into a closeup of the water, showing first a swirl of white against its darkness, followed by an overhead view of two masses of water colliding, one black, the other cloudy and brown in color. Four wetsuit-clad performers (later identified in the credits as “Sanjay, Santosh, Rafeeq, and Shekhawat”) begin to make their way downstream on rectangular rafts. The camera is placed at water level for portions of this journey, giving the viewer a sense of the gray-­ black content of the Yamuna. The performers land on the river bank just past a bridge and unfold a white sheet. The camera then shifts perspective, making a blurry journey down a pipeline until it reaches the end. The shot then snaps into focus and culminates in an overhead perspective, showing an open drain pouring waste into the river, the effluents generating a thick white foam. This foam begins to make its way down river, separating into thick rectangular blocks in a visual echo of the performers’ rafts. Galhotra returns us to the performance as the men lay the sheet across the water and it slowly slips beneath the surface. After churning the water with the sheet—an act captured in slow motion—the performers bring it back up, and the camera pans across the thick black sludge coating the once-white cloth. They then wring the sheet while the camera lingers on the black droplets flying through the air. Finally, the rolled cloth is placed on the ground, and the film ends. With its interrogation of the mutually constitutive nature of pollution and religious practice, Manthan gives viewers a sense of the two as entangled in the Baradian sense, setting up further investigations of these two modes of understanding the river. From its source in the Himalayas until the point where it meets the Ganges at the city of Allahabad, the Yamuna is 855 miles long. Although it springs from the Yamunotri Glacier, the specific point of access for religious pilgrimage is a small hot spring bubbling out of a crevasse. The spring then drains to a natural stone tub in which devotees can bathe and commune with the divine.4 As it travels through the Himalayas, the  David L. Haberman, “River of Love in an Age of Pollution” in Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water. Mary Evelyn Tucker, ed. (Center for the Study of World Religions, 2000), 347. 4

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Yamuna’s water is essentially clean and cascades down the rocky peaks until it hits the floodplain at Dakpatthar. This area is characterized as a boundary, setting up a lengthy series of binaries “between the mountains and the plains, between the natural and the industrial, between river workshop and river management, between Yamuna as a majestically wild river and Yamuna as a greatly reduced stream.”5 Starting at the floodplains, a series of barrages divert water into irrigation canals, leaving only 10 percent of the flow to reach India’s capital, New Delhi, 233 miles away from the source. After Delhi, the Yamuna passes the cities of Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, and Mathura-Vrindavan, site of the birth of the Hindu deity Krishna. After meeting the Ganges, India’s holiest river, this water then flows through Varanasi (Benares), considered the most sacred city in Hinduism.6 Pilgrims and worshipers along the length of the river will use it in religious ceremonies, floating offerings (aarthi) from the banks and ingest the water. Before joining the Ganges, water from the Yamuna serves and sustains up to 54-million people. Accordingly, the river is revered in Hinduism as an essential waterway and as a goddess in itself: Yamuna. According to religious studies scholar David L. Haberman, the nine-­ verse Sanskrit poem, Yamunastakam, by the sixteenth-century saint Vallabhacharya provides a canonical description of Yamuna and captures the river’s cultural and spiritual importance. The verses are addressed to the goddess herself, describing how “you rush down from Kalinda Mountain, your waters bright with white foam./Anxious for love you gush onward, rising and falling through the boulders.”7 This idea of goddess (and the river as a whole) being “anxious for love” is a poignant one and speaks to both the flow of the river within the Himalayas and a desire for spiritual and physical communion. Vallabhacarya continues: “One is spared from the destruction of Yama, god of death, from drinking your milky water.”8 The poem’s “profound effect”9 on religious culture leads Haberman to conclude that “Yamuna, perhaps more than any other goddess in the Hindu pantheon, is a goddess of and for divine love.”10

 Ibid.  I will refer to the city as Varanasi. Some sources quoted will refer to it as Benares. 7  Vallabhacarya, Yamunastakam, quoted in Haberman, 342. (Originally published as Sri Yamunastakam, ed. Kedarnatha Misra, Varanasi Andana Prakasana Samsthana, 1980.) 8  Ibid. 9  Haberman, 342. 10  Ibid., 347. 5 6

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The poem’s description plays on water’s affective nature. Mark Cheetham has described water’s emotional pull in terms that border on new materialism. Given its “diminishing availability” and its destructive potential, Cheetham believes water has an “emotional life” evoking the “emotions we humans feel when thinking about water through eco art … [and] the sense that water may have its own emotional life.”11 This emotional life is inextricably bound up with a millennia-long understanding of the natural world as anthropomorphic. These connections are made evident in Manthan, especially when we consider the role of the Yamuna in Indian history and religion. The emotional life of the Yamuna becomes especially resonant given the river’s decline in an era of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Although it has been described as alternately loving and life-giving, the Yamuna is considered by environmentalists to be a “dead” river. 12 After passing through New Delhi’s northern Wazirabad barrage, the Yamuna absorbs approximately 58 percent of the city’s sewage. With 21-million inhabitants, 500-million gallons of sewage drains into the river each day. 13 In 2018, the Times of India reported that there was almost no dissolved oxygen in any stretch of the Yamuna downstream from Delhi.14 Dissolved oxygen (and its life-sustaining capability) is but one marker of a river’s health. The same study found that the biochemical oxygen demand on the river, a key indicator of sewage levels, remained exponentially above the 3 mg/l limit frequently cited as the standard.15 This was after measures were taken in 2010 to improve sewage treatment facilities. The effluents give the river a distinct black color, leading to the nickname “river of

11  Mark Cheetham, Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the 60s (Penn State Press, 2018), 187–188. 12  See Anil Kumar Misra, “A River about to die: Yamuna” Journal of Water Resource and Protection vol 2, no 5, April 2, 2010: 489–500 13  Michael Safi, “Murder most foul: polluted Indian river reported dead despite ‘living entity’ status.” The Guardian July 7, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ jul/07/indian-yamuna-river-living-entity-ganges 14  Jayashree Nandi, “Oxygen levels show why Yamuna is dead for all practical purposes,” Times of India, August 27, 2018. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/oxygen-­ levels-­show-why-yamuna-is-dead-for-all-practical-purposes/articleshow/65554763.cms 15  A 2010 study found the level to average 93 mg/L.  See Anil Kumar Misra, “A River about to die: Yamuna” Journal of Water Resource and Protection vol 2, no 5, April 2, 2010: 489–500.

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sorrow.”16 The Yamuna also receives industrial and agricultural waste from its tributaries, including toxic pesticides that result in annual mass fish deaths, most strikingly in the vicinity of the Taj Mahal in 2002.17 Barad’s agential realist approach is useful for understanding the entangled nature of the sacred and the profane that informs cultural interactions with the Yamuna and enables its ongoing neglect. The river marks one point of contact, a boundary between the material and the divine, and in doing so takes on the status of a martyr. Galhotra’s Manthan provides a point of entry for considering the larger implications of the river’s paradoxical status. My discussion of Manthan will draw parallels with the work of another Indian-born artist, Amar Kanwar. Kanwar’s forty-two-minute video piece, The Scene of Crime (2011), is filmic interrogation of extractive land use policies in the state of Odisha. In this short film, Kanwar questions the symbolic significance of the environment in relation to its contemporary exploitation. Both Galhotra’s Manthan and Kanwar’s The Scene of Crime provide an entry point into discussions of how historical, material, political, and even legal forces exert profound and competing effects on the environment and those that inhabit it.

Manthan in Context In order to understand the performance depicted in Manthan, it is necessary to decode the reference given in the film’s title: the Samudra Manthan episode in Hindu mythology. Accounts are found across Hinduism’s foundational texts, including the Bhagavata Purana (eighth–tenth century A.D.) and the Vishnu Purana (first millennium B.C.E.), as well as the epic poem Mahabharata (eighth–ninth century B.C.E.).18 An eighteenth-­ century image from India (Fig. 4.2) shows how this episode is depicted  Misra, 494.  As Misra recounts: “On 13th June 2002, thousands of dead and dying fishes were found strewn over the Sikendra Taj Mahal area along the water body. Reports of more fish deaths poured in from Bateshwar, about 78 km from Poiya Ghat in Agra. Such incidents are common; almost every year mass death of fishes is reported in Yamuna River” (Misra, 491). David L. Haberman also describes how upon leaving Delhi, the river contains “arsenic, cyanide, lead, mercury, and other industrial pollutants, as well as considerable amounts of human excrement” (Haberman, 348). 18  For a comparative interpretation and more thorough background on the Samudra Manthan, see Jon Paul Sydnor, “All is of God: Joy, Suffering, and the Interplay of Contrasts,” Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology 2, no. 1 (2018): 83–104. 16 17

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Fig. 4.2  The Churning of the Ocean of Milk (India, 1780–1790)

visually. The gods and the asuras (demons) join together to churn the Ocean of Milk, using a mountain (Mount Mandara) as the churning rod and turning it with Vasuki, a massive snake. The churning is meant to release amrita, or the nectar of immortality. The Mahabharata provides a detailed description: And the gods and the Asuras made of Mandara a churning staff and Vasuki the cord, and set about churning the deep for amrita. The Asuras held Vasuki by the hood and the gods held him by the tail. And Ananta, who was on the side of the gods, at intervals raised the snake’s hood and suddenly lowered it. And in consequence of the stretch Vasuki received at the hands

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of the gods and the Asuras, black vapours with flames issued from his mouth.19

The churning continues with great destruction: Then … out of the deep came a tremendous roar. … Diverse aquatic animals being crushed by the great mountain gave up the ghost in the salt waters. And many denizens of the lower regions and the world of Varuna were killed. Large trees with birds on the whirling Mandara were torn up by the roots and fell into the water. The mutual friction of those trees also produced fires that blazed up frequently. The mountain thus looked like a mass of dark clouds charged with lightning. O Brahmana, the fire spread, and consumed the lions, elephants and other creatures that were on the mountain.20

While the Mahabharata describes the epic destruction, the Vishnu Purana alludes to an additional and simultaneous creation: Next, from the whirlpool of the deep, sprang the celestial Párijáta tree, the delight of the nymphs of heaven, perfuming the world with its blossoms. The troop of Ápsarasas, the nymphs of heaven, were then produced, of surprising loveliness, endowed with beauty and with taste.21

After much churning, a lethal poison called Kalakuta22 emerges from the ocean and threatens to destroy all of existence. The deity Shiva swallows it, and in so doing, burns his throat and turns it a distinct shade of blue, marking his sacrifice. But with the churning still going on, the poison Kalakuta appeared at last. Engulfing the Earth it suddenly blazed up like a fire attended with fumes. And by the scent of the fearful Kalakuta, the three worlds were stupefied. And then Siva, being solicited by Brahman, swallowed that poison for the

19  Mahabharata, Astika Parva section XVIII. Available online: http://www.sacred-texts. com/hin/m01/m01019.htm 20  Ibid. 21  Vishnu Purana, ch. IX.  Available online: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/ vp044.htm 22  Or, in some translations, Halahala.

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safety of the creation. The divine Maheswara held it in his throat, and it is said that from that time he is called Nilakantha (blue-throated).23

The world having been saved, the gods and demons battle for the amrita, with the gods eventually winning immortality. 24 The performance depicted in Galhotra’s Manthan borrows from the legend but offers no positive resolution. The Yamuna River, itself sacred, brings forth poison from its water. The churning of the water dredges out but a small portion of that toxic sludge, and the symbolic gesture performed points at the vast scope of the problem rather than offer the once promised immortality. As with most political eco-artworks, Galhotra’s film invites conflicting interpretations. Critic Adrian Muoio describes the inherent optimism of the Hindu legend: “According to Hindu mythology, many magnificent beings and objects were born in the process. Galhotra’s film … presents a similarly optimistic possibility for the achievement of newfound life in the dark stagnant depths of blight.”25 While Muoio’s reading of the myth is important, it leaves out the equal destruction that the Samudra Manthan episode entails. The Mahabharata also describes aquatic animals, trees, birds, and “denizens of the lower regions” being killed in the process. The churning is a violent act, one accomplished on a geological scale: an ocean churned by a mountain. In Galhotra’s film, the action is more intimate; the use of the white sheet evokes a shroud rather than Mount Mandara. The violence is directed inward, toward the river, and outward, hinting at the health risk involved for the performers and those who come in contact with the river. Poison and death are at the forefront, raising the question of who will step in to absorb the toxins and save the Yamuna. Galhotra’s focus on the poison entwines the legend with material substance, and it is here that I bring in Barad’s agential realist approach, reading matter and discourse as mutually constitutive and ultimately diffractive.

 Mahabharata.  This episode is one of the most well known in Hinduism, one that would be easily recognized by the local population—Manthan’s intended audience. In scholarship, “Samudra Manthan” serves as a shorthand for social and political upheaval, a direct reflection of the motion of churning. In 2012, C. Raja Mohan titled his study of Chinese and Indian maritime tensions Samudra Manthan, an indication of anxiety at the prospect of the rise of China. 25  Adrian Muoio, “Making Art Amidst the Death of an Immortal River,” The Wire, December 19, 2015. https://thewire.in/culture/making-art-amidst-the-death-of-an-immortal-river 23 24

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The River as Paradox Galhotra’s Manthan locates a primary vector of environmental pollution in religious practice and ideology. In this case, labeling a body of water as holy becomes enough to render it symbolically pure, regardless of its material content. In a 2015 lecture, Galhotra discussed the “absurd contradiction between belief and reality” 26 in how the Yamuna has been treated. The river’s plight is similar to the paradoxical status of sacred waters across the world. This contradiction provides a way into a larger reading of the river, its symbolic existence, and its representation in Manthan. In doing so, it answers the question of how a river so revered could be at once so polluted, the literal receptacle for human, industrial, and agricultural waste. Anthropologist Terje Oestigaard, in an analysis of the spiritual qualities of the Nile River, explains the internal consistency between religious veneration of water and the resulting pollution in sacred rites: While polluting other holy substances or places, like an altar, is a sacrilege and a heinous sin, cosmologically speaking, polluting holy water in the right way is not. … Worldwide, erasing pollution and impurity … is the most general and omnipresent capacity of holy water. Religiously, holy water transmits purity and holiness, but in practice, this involves divine processes. … Thus, in the very process of obtaining spiritual purity, devotees dispose of their impurities in the holy water either symbolically or physically. 27

In Oestigaard’s assessment, the Nile, like other holy rivers, including the Ganges, the Jordan, and the Yamuna, is holy due to its capacity to absorb the world’s impurities. In Hinduism, the detritus of religious ritual can mean anything from those small aarthi mentioned earlier (often a banana leaf, a small lamp, and flowers) to the disposal of non-cremated corpses.28 At the same time, religious ritual compels the worshiper to make  Vibha Galhotra, lecture at “Field Meeting Take 3: Thinking Performance” at Asia Contemporary Art Week 2015 (November 1, 2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= iffLnb5u8UM&feature=youtu.be&t=44m33s 27  Terje Oestigaard, “The Sources of the Nile and the Paradox of Religious Waters” Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, 11, Summer 2018. http://editions.lib.umn.edu/ openrivers/article/the-sources-of-the-nile-and-paradoxes-of-religious-waters/#_ednref27 28  While the disposal of unburnt bodies causes sensational headlines (and a compendium of disturbing photographs), this is not an accepted practice in either the Ganges or the Yamuna Rivers. A recent study by environmentalist B.D. Tripathi put the number at 3028 human bodies found in the Ganges. See Binay Singh, “Varanasi too has its share of bodies floating in Ganga,” The Times of India, January 17, 2015. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ home/environment/pollution/Varanasi-too-has-its-share-of-bodies-floating-in-Ganga/ articleshow/45921279.cms 26

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physical contact with the water, either wading into it, submerging oneself beneath the surface, or ingesting a mouthful. As Oestigaard notes, if the water has taken and absorbed impurities as a result of its holy status, it will not then pass those impurities on to the devotee. It instead transforms and transports them, so the symbolic risk of ingestion is mitigated. The circumstances surrounding the Yamuna illustrate how the material and spiritual practices of Hinduism constitute in themselves an entanglement of matter and discourse. Through Barad’s concept of entanglement, the Yamuna is first established as sacred due to its life-giving capacities (its very matter); communion with the sacred is achieved through a practice that depends upon the interaction of the sacred and the mundane. Haberman observes that “[o]ne cannot arrive at the highest level of the adhidaivka [divine form of the goddess] by abandoning the world of concrete forms … the physical form of the river is essential to achieving the higher realms of loving devotion.”29 It is here that materiality is worth elucidating, for water is a substance that can be used for both immersion and ingestion, an enveloping of the devotee from without and within. The death of the Yamuna, however, is both material and social. Haberman recounts anecdotal evidence of the changes wrought by pollution from his visits in the early 1980s through the mid-1990s. Pilgrims to the site of Mathura-Vrindavan, located approximately 100 miles downstream from Delhi, ceased to bathe in the Yamuna over the course of that period and had even stopped pouring its waters on the statues of deities in the temple (a common religious ritual).30 River life, after all, is an entanglement of organisms that depend on the river for survival with those that rely upon it for social, cultural, and historical nourishment. Lack of access to the river makes material alterations in the practice of religion. Accordingly, pollution precludes the act of bathing in the Yamuna and prevents worshipers from achieving that divine communion. Given the Yamuna’s current state, all but the most ardent worshipers avoid direct contact with the river. The neglect is compounded as the community turns away from the river and it ceases to hold the same place of honor it once assumed.

 Haberman, 351.  Haberman, 349.

29 30

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The Yamuna’s death, then, is a tale of governmental and societal neglect both in contrast to and compounded by symbolic veneration. Following Oestigaard, we see that it is the Yamuna’s status as holy river and as a goddess in itself that enables this culture of neglect. Although one would argue that floating an offering and dumping hazardous waste are categorically different acts, within the logic of the divine river they are only separated by questions of scale rather than intent. Read through this lens, the municipal mismanagement of environmental funds meant for river cleanup is both a symptom of widespread corruption and an indication of societal priorities about the cleanliness and overall health of the river. Manthan, then, is an indictment of the very fabric of a culture dominated by religious priorities at the expense of the mundane. In a study of the Ganges River, Kelly D. Alley teases apart the reasons why some religious sites become politicized while others are not. In Varanasi, priests drew a stark distinction between material cleanliness and spiritual purity.31 Accordingly, they “associated scientific techniques for ‘cleaning’ the river with the corruption and inefficiency of government and distrusted both the theories and the officials who espoused them.”32 Significant, then, is that decontaminating the river was actively resisted— not just ignored—due to the collusion between science and government. But Alley’s assessment goes further, locating resistance to the environmental movement in religious hierarchies: The ideology of environmental cleanliness is potentially subversive to the ideology of purity upon which a pilgrim priest’s own position of authority rests. … While depending upon a vital divine Ganga, they cannot actively engage in ‘saving’ her material form … while encouraging Hindu pilgrims

31  Kelly D. Alley, “Separate Domains: Hinduism, Politics, and Environmental Pollution,” In Hinduism and Ecology: The Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water. Mary Evelyn Tucker, ed. (Center for the Study of World Religions, 2000), 357. 32  Alley, 358. This contradiction is not limited to Hinduism nor rivers. The New York Times describes the Carter Center’s efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm from Nigeria for over twenty years, and how that progress was slowed due to villagers’ beliefs about sacred water and a refusal to tamper with the spirits of their ancestors contained within. See Donald G. McNeil Jr, “Dose of Tenacity Wears Down a Horrific Disease” New York Times, March 26, 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/world/africa/dose-of-tenacity-wearsdown-­a-horrific-disease.html

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to respect Ganga’s grace, they can neither ask them to consider her fall from grace nor take up the higher power to control, or ‘clean’ her.33

Politicizing religion, then, would have the effect of undermining religious authority, at least in environmental matters.34 Alley’s study of the Ganges, as well as the twenty-first-century discussion of the polluted Yamuna, poses a problem about how artists or writers should represent and interpret belief. The everyday rituals of religious practice appear inscrutable to the outside observer, and attempts to interpret them for a Western audience necessarily involve inadequacies in translation. To address this challenge, I turn to the debates surrounding one particular ethnographic film. In his piece Forest of Bliss (1985) ethnographer Robert Gardner intended to create a visual poem of the experience of daily life in the holy city of Varanasi, a life centered around the management of death.35 Eschewing the omniscient narrative voice of traditional ethnography, Gardner instead presents a ninety-minute meditation, an amalgam of decontextualized sounds, ethereal visuals, and untranslated speech. Because there is little to no way “in” to the scenes for the viewers, they are left out of the narrative altogether; the scenes play out regardless of that presumably Western gaze. In Gardner’s film, the Ganges River is a unifying presence, the magnetic center of all the activity depicted. Anthropologist Ákos Östör, who collaborated with Gardner on the film, muses that “although the river is a river, it is also a goddess, that it’s both a thing and something that transcends the thing.”36 Like the Yamuna, the Ganges also entangles the transcendent and immanent dimensions that characterize religious ritual. 33  Ibid. “The tradition of religious mobilization has never exhibited efforts to engage in any form of environmental activism … eulogies to Ganga … are central sacred symbols in pilgrimages and in puja, but they do not describe … a finite resource whose contours are shaped by a larger ecosystem” (Alley, 377). 34  Sacred sites are frequently politicized for non-environmental ends. The case of Ayodhya, a site sacred to both Hindus and Muslims, provides an extreme example of this phenomenon. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as of 2018 the ruling party of India, was involved in the 1992 destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque at Ayodhya. 35  Varanasi revolves around death due to its status as one of the most sacred sites in Hinduism. According to religious belief, anyone who dies and is cremated within this city is freed from the cycle of death and rebirth. An entire industry of death, including the so-called Death Hotels, caters to pilgrims who have come to Varanasi solely to die. 36  Ákos Östör, quoted in Robert Gardner and Ákos Östör, Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance, and Chance in Nonfiction Film (Harvard Film Archive, 2002), 31.

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Gardner’s Forest of Bliss drew immediate attention and created a lasting controversy within anthropological circles. Among the scenes depicted without context or narration are images of bloated human remains in the river, a dog gnawing on an unidentified (and possibly human) corpse, decaying animals dragged unceremoniously down the steps of the river’s ghats, and a funeral service in which an uncremated body is disposed of in the Ganges. This imagery was interspersed with traditional forms of Hindu worship, leading viewers to conclusions that religious practice was responsible for contaminating the river. As Östör recalls, “We had a lot of discussion and arguments about filming the filth and the corpses, all these matters that outrage the uninformed visitor. … Benares is not a hell-hole of death and corruption, but if certain people see any evidence for some of these things they will assume the basest motives for the images being included.” 37 To that effect, anthropologist Jonathan Parry wrote a scathing review, concluding that “I have an uneasy suspicion about what [the film] is likely to convey to many Western audiences. India is an ineffable world apart which must elude our comprehension. No explanation is possible, and all we can do is stand and stare.”38 Other anthropologists and ethnographers leveled critiques that also seized upon the issue of the viewer’s interpretation. Alexander Moore questioned the film’s status as a documentary, claiming that “as art, one could make a case that this is a visually absorbing film … what is missing are precisely the devices to make the beautiful images fully intelligible, and not horrible images of heathenry being filthy.”39 Jay Ruby, however, was unconvinced even of the film’s aesthetic merit, finding it “a jumble of incomprehensible vignettes that are apparently to be savored for their formal content and the juxtaposition of the images and sequences. … I am left with a kind of pure formalism.”40 37  Ibid. 23. Gardner goes on to justify the inclusion of this unsavory side of Benares through his own experience in the city: “[Y]ou not only have to think about trying to make a beautiful film but to wonder when some human waste is going to be squeezed up between your toes as you take your next step. So I decided there was only one way to deal with this, and that was to include it in the film” (Gardner, quoted in Gardner and Östör, 41). 38  Jonathan Parry, “Comment on Robert Gardner’s ‘Forest of Bliss’” Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (September 1988), 7. 39  Alexander Moore, “The Limitations of Imagist Documentary: A Review of Robert Gardner’s ‘Forest of Bliss’” Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (September 1988), 1. 40  Jay Ruby, “The Emperor and His Clothes: A Comment” Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 1989), 11. One gathers a certain animosity between Ruby and Gardner that is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it may have contributed to Ruby’s refusal to concede even the film’s aesthetic merit.

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Common to all these critiques is the sense that Varanasi and its rituals require explanation first and foremost, privileging the viewer’s perspective over that of the people depicted. The experiential nature of spiritual life in Varanasi is downplayed or ignored altogether. Forest of Bliss, unlike traditional ethnographic film, is not intended to educate the uninitiated viewer. The mysteries of death are instead paralleled in the structure of the film itself. Accordingly, sociologist Radhika Chopra lauded the open-ended nature of Forest of Bliss, calling the film’s silence a “triumph” that is “true to the nature of the society which does not quarantine one interpretation from another, nor give precedence to any single level of cognition.”41 The film, then, does not translate Hindu spiritual beliefs for a Western audience. Instead, the decontextualized visuals allow that audience momentary entry into the modes of thinking that make up such practice. Forest of Bliss resonates with Walter Mignolo’s idea of “border thinking,” in that it cedes interpretive capacity to the object of study. In doing so, the film gives viewers temporary access to non-Western epistemologies, putting them into visual and experiential form. The film ends up being about the management of death and its interior knowledges and worlds which others cannot readily access. The corpses floating in the river, however, allude to the material practice of religion and the seemingly contradictory veneration of the Ganges. Although not a sanctioned practice in Hinduism, corpse disposal in the river relies upon the same thought processes as do more accepted forms of religious offering. Östör addresses this question of purity from a different angle than Oestigaard or Alley, and it is worth quoting at length: [A]t what point does the mess clog the river and defeat its purpose of regeneration and purification? I guess cultures are not good at dealing with these kinds of questions, because practices and beliefs accumulate, and they all make perfect sense in the case of each animal being returned to the river or each corpse being immersed in it, but at some point, it becomes just too much for the river to handle, and then it becomes a matter of pollution rather than holiness … it would have been very easy to show just that particular side, the depravity or the degeneracy of it all. But the other, meaningful side of the river as Goddess, as the Mother taking all her children into her lap, is also there. … Stairs, carcasses, and refuse are multivocal symbols, and

41  Radhika Chopra, “Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss: A Review,” Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 1989), 3.

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for that very reason they are elements of a local situation that is being politicized and is changing before our eyes.42

Östör’s insistence here on the “multivocal symbols” prefigures the way Galhotra would interrogate religious symbolism three decades later. Also important is the sense of accumulation, that each act in and of itself is justifiable in terms of communion with the divine, but in the aggregate slides from holiness to pollution. Chopra’s review contradicts this sentiment, as she claims that for the priest depicted bathing in the Ganges, the river’s water “imparts a sense of purity which is clearly not derived from notions of hygiene but must certainly find its logic in the sanctity of sacred things.”43 Holiness and pollution, then, are not two sides of a binary; instead they exist on completely separate planes. Their points of contact happen at these charged sites: the Ganges, Varanasi, the Yamuna, and countless other nodes. Returning to Manthan, it becomes clear that Galhotra takes advantage of a more flexible intellectual apparatus—artwork rather than the didactic lens of ethnography—than does Forest of Bliss. I would argue, though, that a similar kind of border thinking takes place, in that the performance of the churning gives viewers momentary insight into an act of veneration and sacrifice. Manthan’s direct invocation of religion, however, speaks to the need to tease apart the often-contradictory factors that contribute to environmental crisis. Although the pollution level of the Yamuna or the Ganges is measured scientifically in terms of dissolved oxygen, industrial effluents, and other compounds found in the water, the power of discourse cannot be ignored. It is religious discourse, after all, that enables a holy man to bathe downstream from floating corpses in Forest of Bliss, and it insists on the Yamuna’s capacity to absorb urban and industrial waste while bringing forth only love.

The Toxic Sublime Aside from the performance depicted in Manthan and the invocation of religion, the film’s most arresting imagery is that of the toxic foam clogging the Yamuna. This phenomenon has been observed around the world and is linked to the presence of heavy metals. One striking example is the  Östör, quoted in Gardner and Östör, 69–70.  Chopra, 3.

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September 2010 foaming of Brazil’s Tietê River.44 Photographs from Brazil closely mirror the vision of the Yamuna captured in Galhotra’s film. In Manthan, the camera revels in the foam’s march down the river, backed by a persistent drumbeat that mimics the encroachment of an advancing army. The material itself appears light and sectioned off naturally into rectangular pieces. The video gives no sense of geography, and the viewer is left to wonder where this drain lies in relation to the performers. The foam acts as a counterpart to the ecstatic description of the goddess Yamuna in Vallabhacarya’s poem, in which he rhapsodizes on “your waters bright with white foam.”45 In the sixteenth-century verse, foam brings delight, a sensation of attraction, and an invitation to enter, rather than the harbinger of death depicted in Galhotra’s piece. The encroaching foam and its visual incongruity in the landscape evoke the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, particularly his photographs of nickel tailings outside of Sudbury, Ontario. Tailings are byproducts of the mining industry, and in Burtynsky’s photographs, they emit an unnatural orange glow as they form rivers of their own.46 Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario (1996) (Fig.  4.3) explores the contrast between expectation and reality. The nickel tailings take on the quality of a lava flow, snaking their way through a blackened landscape. On the elevated horizon line are clusters of bare trees and a small hill against a gray sky. The almost monochrome palate of the photograph renders the tailings all the more striking. They glow orange due to a combination of pyrite and sulfide, themselves harmless, but reactive with air and leading to a destructive condition known as acid mine drainage. Burtynsky makes a point of leaving the photograph unaltered, so that the orange of this “river” is presumably the same hue originally captured in his camera. The overall aesthetic is seductive, inviting prolonged attention and rewarding the viewer’s gaze. Sarah Jaquette Ray argues that Burtynsky’s aesthetic of the “toxic sublime” “exposes viewers to uncomfortable pleasure” and “asks viewers to question their assumptions about the relationship between beauty and 44  See National Geographic, “Toxic Foam Chokes Brazil River” September 23, 2010. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/09/ photogalleries/100921-toxic-foam-river-brazil-science-environment-pictures/ 45  Vallabhacarya, Yamunastakam, quoted in Haberman, 342 46  To recall Mitra Azar’s Scars & Borders discussed in the previous chapter, the bauxite mine he filmed from the drone would release its own share of the 77-million total tons of tailings produced annually in aluminum manufacturing.

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Fig. 4.3  Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario (1996)

value.”47 The very reason viewers are drawn into the work, she claims, is their own complicity in aesthetic hierarchies that value scenic nature, such as the US National Parks, while overlooking landscapes of extraction and industry. Burtynsky’s work “remedies this attachment to beauty through the toxic sublime, which exposes the hypocrisies between beauty and disgust in his audience’s ostensible love of nature.”48 Aesthetic pleasure is here the strategy, the point of the tailings photographs as well as the larger compendia of his work: Manufactured Landscapes (2006).49 In the tailings images, specifically, the Orange River appears post-apocalyptic, volcanic, and decidedly out of human control. The toxic sublime intersects with Galhotra’s visual narrative in Manthan. Aside from Ray, rhetorician Jennifer Peeples has offered up the most 47  Sarah Jaquette Ray (2016), “Environmental Justice, Vital Materiality, and the Toxic Sublime in Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes,” GeoHumanities 2:1, 205. 48  Ray, 215. 49  With this, I refer both to Lori Pauli’s book Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky (National Gallery of Canada, 2003) and to Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 film of the same name.

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comprehensive understanding of this concept and uses Burtynsky’s work as an example. She defines the toxic sublime as “the tensions that arise from recognizing the toxicity of a place, object, or situation, while simultaneously appreciating its mystery, magnificence and ability to inspire awe.”50 Citing historical connections to the sublime in landscape painting and photography, she argues that these images “do not leave the viewer in a state of paralysis. The compositional choices … render images fraught with tensions that require thought and contemplation which … provide the impetus necessary for attitudinal change.”51 The nickel tailings photograph I discussed, then, acts in this manner, drawing in viewers through its seeming incongruity. By denying those viewers any context for the image, immersing them in environmental horror without a scapegoat, Peeples contends that Burtynsky “precludes the audience from the closure associated with knowing all three elements of a toxic narrative: a contaminant, a victim and a site.”52 I argue that Manthan gives a more complete narrative, for in the case of the personified river, the victim and the site are one and the same. This complication is one that a Western framework doesn’t take into account: the complexities of the human relationship with the natural and the interventions of the divine. One main reason for this omission is found the canon of toxic sublime landscape photographers: Peeples cites Burtynsky, David Hanson, David Maisel, Chris Jordan, Alan Berger, Peter Goin, and Emmet Gowin. Without exception, this is a homogeneous group: a white, male, Global North perspective on environmental degradation. Bringing an artist such as Galhotra into this canon troubles the neat visual tropes they present, which include radically depopulated landscapes and uncertainty as to the viewer’s vantage point within the composition. In Manthan, the focus is on the river and the performers, and the cause of the pollution is well-­ known: the rampant urbanization and industrialization that have improved the standard of living across the subcontinent. Rather than trafficking in ambiguity, Galhotra’s film gets its rhetorical heft from its specificity and the direct implication of the viewing subject. Considering the idea of the toxic sublime in relation to Manthan, however, has implications for the film’s political import and how it operates within the broader arena of eco 50  Jennifer Peeples, “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental Communication Vol. 5, No. 4 (December 2011), 375. 51  Peeples, 380. 52  Peeples, 385.

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art. I argue that Manthan does engage the idea of sublimity, if from a vastly different perspective than Burtynsky and his cohort. I return to the river of foam moving downstream from the drain. The shock value here comes not from color, but from texture, the apparent stability of the foam contrasted with its ethereal qualities. The brief overhead vantage point echoes the aerial perspectives prized by Burtynsky and photographers such as David Maisel, who veers toward pure abstraction when depicting toxic landscapes. Both Burtynsky’s photograph and the scene in Manthan point to something otherworldly, enhanced through a reading of the sacred. The volcanic allusions of the nickel tailings evoke numerous mythologies surrounding fire as well as visual references to the underworld. The Yamuna’s foam evokes clouds, inviting easy associations with the Christian heaven, but also a more culturally appropriate parallel in the churning of the white, frothy Ocean of Milk from the Samudra Manthan. This mythological episode asks the worshiper to conceive of something immense: the ocean churned by a mountain. The size of the waves thus produced, the towering whitecaps it would generate call to mind a longstanding trope of evoking the sublime through images of terrifying water: the tsunami, the rogue wave, the perfect storm. The sublime as outlined by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant is a Western concept, but acknowledgment of this origin doesn’t necessarily preclude its articulation outside of that specific framework.53 In Vallabhacarya’s poem about the Yamuna, the ecstatic communion with the divine is exactly the kind of physical disorientation—the rapid collapse and expansion of outer and inner space—that Kant and Burke evoke. By referencing the divine, Galhotra’s film traffics directly in a different kind of thinking about the sublime and its relationship to the viewing body. The film itself is visually enticing, almost seductive with selective slowed motion and a warbling voice ebbing and flowing on the soundtrack to match the river. The images themselves, however, never directly visualize the sublime. Instead, the continued references—either through divine communion or through the analogies to the Ocean of Milk—give the knowledgeable viewer the tools to understand how the sublime can be harnessed for political ends. Perhaps the strongest critique of the toxic sublime comes from literary theorist and visual culture scholar Jill Gatlin, writing in response to 53  See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790).

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Peeples.54 She argues that without an accompanying discursive apparatus, these photographs disturb “viewers’ aesthetic sensibilities, not their identities as consumers, polluters, or political agents … it deflects attention from the socially contingent environmental injustices accompanying toxicity and the coalition, collective action necessary redress them.”55 While Peeples finds the lack of a complete narrative within the images to be troubling for viewers, Gatlin insists that it absolves them of blame. There is no easy translation from the aesthetic disorientation brought by the sublime to the necessary political realignment that eco art seeks to engender. Galhotra’s use of narrative and the identification of both victim and perpetrators lend Manthan the kind of specificity that Gatlin would find politically expedient. Galhotra, however, embeds this discursive apparatus within the film instead of in didactic materials. Accessing this apparatus requires local knowledge, a kind of border thinking, not the objective facts and figures that a scientific lens would impart. Although the foam had been a consistent presence in the Yamuna for years, it attained global notoriety in 2017, when photographs of the river seemingly covered in snow appeared in international news outlets as well as the Weather Channel’s home page. The Associated Press images trafficked in the kind of sensationalism without context that moves swiftly through digital space. One such photograph appeared on ABC News, among other sites, depicting a shirtless river bather surrounded by the foam. Such an image prompts a mixture of pity and horror in the (Western) viewer. The bather comes to appear as alien as the foam itself, so vastly different is his situation from the casual browser. The construction of this image, as well as numerous others, increases the distance and presents the brown body as irreconcilably other, engaging in inscrutable rituals at the expense of its well-being. This scenario, however, allows for only one sense of well-being, ignoring the possibility of the spiritual wellness bestowed by communion with the river. French photographer Zacharie Rabehi provides a counterpoint. Living in Delhi during that 2017 event, he created the series Toxic City to document the Indian capital’s battle with pollution.56 Rabehi is quoted as 54  Jill Gatlin, “Toxic Sublimity and the Crisis of Human Perception: Rethinking Aesthetic, Documentary, and Political Appeals in Contemporary Wasteland Photography,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22.4 (Autumn 2015), 55  Gatlin, 718. 56  Rabehi’s work in India (he has also traveled around Bangladesh, Nepal, Cuba, and several places in Europe) takes on a decidedly social cast. He photographs Hijra (third gender)

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­ oting the discrepancy between the delicate beauty of the foam-covered n river and the smell emanating from the water: “[I]t smells like shit. Toxic shit, chemical sewage—a bit of sulfur, a bit of human excrement.”57 Images from the series show Delhi residences snapping “smog selfies,” a backlit dump truck unloading refuse at the Ghazipur landfill, and a fisherman casting his net into the dying Yamuna. However, the Toxic City photograph most in dialogue with Galhotra’s Manthan is one I shall discuss at length. Rather than the spectacle of the Associated Press photographs, Rabehi’s image doesn’t privilege the viewer at the expense of those it depicts. The horizon line divides the image neatly in half: above, a thick haze obscures a few high-rise buildings and high tension electrical towers, symbols of Delhi’s relentless modernization. The atmosphere lends them a hazy, almost dreamlike quality against the sharply rendered foreground. The Yamuna, clotted with thick white foam, takes up most of the lower half of the photograph, its waters reflecting the same gray haze of the sky. In the center foreground, two figures, a man and a woman, stand facing the river with their backs to the camera. The riverbank is littered with refuse and dead plant material, and there are no signs of life other than the people standing at the river’s edge. Although their faces are turned away, the viewer sees that the couple are, in fact, praying, worshiping the Yamuna as their ancestors have done for centuries. Rabehi’s image makes reference to the toxic sublime through a visual quotation of one of the most frequently cited Romantic-era seascapes, Caspar David Friedrich’s 1809 Monk by the Sea. In the nineteenth-century painting, Friedrich places the sole human figure of the monk against an encroaching storm. The sky occupies most of the painting, and the viewer feels a kinship with the monk: rendered insignificant against the forces of nature. In Rabehi’s images, the devotees are set against a tableau that demonstrates not the vastness of the natural world, but the destructive power of humanity. The toxic sublime is here a creeping presence, bubbling up from the river’s depths and presenting itself as that sulfurous foam. Although not a direct reference to a specific practice, ritual, or legend as in Manthan, the Toxic City photograph also presents the viewer with the paradox of sacred and profane. Rabehi foregrounds the spiritual communities and acid attack survivors, among others. 57  Rabehi, quoted in Laura Mallonee, “India’s Most Polluted River Actually Bubbles with Toxic Foam” Wired (April 5, 2017). https://www.wired.com/2017/04/ zacharie-rabehi-toxic-city/

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significance of the river, as the figures in the image are praying, heads bowed toward the Yamuna. The nature of their worship is unclear, but the location on the river bank indicates that they are most likely addressing the goddess. This image invites comparison with Manthan by once again visualizing the relationship between reverence for the river and the extreme scale of its neglect. Rabehi’s lens is here a documentary one, maintaining its distance from the figures and not venturing such a critical stance as does Galhotra. I would venture that it is his status as a foreigner, a visitor from Western Europe, that limits his interrogation of the pollution. Galhotra, an Indian citizen and resident of New Delhi, undertakes a kind of self-analysis through Manthan. The film is aesthetically pleasurable, in keeping with toxic sublime, but steeped in larger discourses about the political utilization of the sacred. Galhotra can do this because she comes at the subject from within. Stating this risks essentializing Galhotra, her work, and the conversations which it seeks to start, but to reorient this dilemma in terms of border ecology reveals that this position is not limiting, but profoundly liberating. Outside voices, while able to comment on a specific, local environmental crisis, are necessarily circumscribed by identity, as in the work of Burtynsky, Rabehi, and Mendel. Rabehi’s image reads not as a critique of religious priorities, but as a study in contrasts: the veneration of an ancient religion undercut by the toxic byproducts of industrialization. The social and the material are here juxtaposed, but not read through each other. Galhotra’s film, on the other hand, gives an entry point to discuss environmental crisis as both material and discursively constituted in an escalating feedback loop. To pick up the theme I developed in Chap. 2, here is yet another gap in Maya Lin’s map. If interrogating the silences of What is Missing? led to an examination of slow violence, then here such an excavation prompts a critique of identity and representation. These questions are not tangential to the depiction of ecological crisis. Rather, they are integral to the genre of eco art. The political work of the toxic sublime, theorized as a primarily aesthetic intervention, rests on a series of false, if not damaging assumptions. The photographer’s perspective (masculine, Global North) is here presumed neutral, and the affective force of such toxic visions taken as a universal. The debate over whether such images can, in fact, mobilize viewers makes equally general assumptions as to the identity of the audience and their relative political power. Manthan’s flirtation with the toxic sublime does much to expose the genre’s limitations and question the

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logic of its presumed objectivity. Filtered through Galhotra’s lens, the foam clogging the Yamuna becomes otherworldly; it serves as a reference both to the divine and to human-driven forces that have spiraled out of control. Rather than an aesthetic exercise or an assignation of blame, Manthan asks viewers to understand the larger entanglements at play in the construction of such a toxic landscape.

The Scene of Crime Shifting from toxicity to extraction allows for an additional set of entangled concepts: those pertaining to legal systems and classifications of citizenship. Amar Kanwar’s film The Scene of Crime is the focal point of his multimedia Sovereign Forest installation (2012). Exhibited temporarily at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the piece has a simultaneous permanent installation in Bhubaneswar, Odisha,58 hosted by the Samadrusti Media activist group. The forty-three-minute video juxtaposes scenes of the landscape in India’s eastern state of Odisha with textual and sonic overlays, conveying a sense of precarity, an ecosystem on the edge. The pacing is slow, lingering on images mostly devoid of people. As with much of Kanwar’s work, there is no narrative to be gleaned from the images and no authoritative voice to interpret them. Instead, each visual is in dialogue with the others, set against the text and submerged in an ambient soundscape. Unlike Forest of Bliss, with its positioning as an ethnography, The Scene of Crime does not set out to translate cultural practices for a Western audience. Rather, viewers are primed to make sense of the sounds and visuals in their own ways. Ultimately, The Scene of Crime is the stage set for crimes both past and future. The film’s introductory titles establish the stakes, informing the viewer of the contested nature of this landscape. Each location, Kanwar advises, is on the brink of destruction, along with its human and nonhuman inhabitants. In the 1990s, the state government laid the groundwork for the extraction of iron ore and bauxite reserves, setting up 600 mine lease areas.59 As I discussed in relation to Mitra Azar’s vista of the Sardinian bauxite mine, the extractive nature of mining is emblematic of an  Formerly known as Orissa. The state’s name was changed in 2011. This name change is part of a larger politics of naming (and re-naming) in India and is far beyond the scope of this study. 59  Daniela Zyman, “Undermining Sovereignty: Three Emergences within Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest” in Amar Kanwar—The Sovereign Forest, Daniela Zyman, ed. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 28. 58

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exploitation that, along the timescales of slow violence, “creeps into existence without any concern for the immeasurable human or environmental repercussions of these developments.”60 One such mining corporation, the UK-based Vedanta, was the target of widespread protests in the early twenty-first century. The Odisha natives decried what they saw as a recolonization of their territory, fueled by international capital. In 2010, the Indian Supreme Court handed down a ruling that resulted in the repeal of clearance for the mine. 61 Protestors must continually work to keep out Vedanta, for in 2015, Narendra Modi’s BJP-led government passed an ordinance meant to make corporate land acquisition easier. 62 Kanwar organizes The Scene of Crime into ten “maps” of varying lengths. Though not maps in the cartographic sense, these vignettes do chart a mental landscape, a dreamlike terrain. The use of “map” to organize the film also implies navigation, a sense of motion, and an intentionality to this movement. Kanwar leads the viewer on a journey, with only these visual and auditory maps as clues. These maps generate connections, an approach that is at the core of Kanwar’s larger project. In an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kanwar discussed the strange dialogue that happens between the different parts of the exhibition, and ultimately the different scenes of the film: “The moment you start actually relating and seeing inner narratives between and within what is around you, a different kind of memory emerges, a different kind of movement occurs in the mind.”63 Exhibition designer Sherna Dastur also elaborated on this point, claiming that “at best, you get a sense of many sets of connected objects and the space that surrounds them. … I find this continuously shifting counter-space most interesting. It is in this space that what we see gets infused with what is not there.”64 With this focus on objects, Kanwar’s work adheres to the logic of new materialism. The objects depicted are connected through the mechanism of video and their shared precarity. In Kanwar’s film, they speak a private language to  Zyman, 28.  Kate Macdonald, Shelley Marshall, and Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, “Demanding Rights in Company-Community Resource Extraction Conflicts: Examining the Cases of Vedanta and POSCO in Odisha, India,” in Demanding Justice in the Global South: Claiming Rights, Jean Grugel, ed. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 44. 62  Macdonald, et al., 47–48. Modi’s stance on the environment is a complex one, as his government has undertaken significant measures to combat pollution. At the same time, the BJP remains firmly on the side of corporate interests. 63  Kanwar, quoted in “Archipelic Thinking—Amar Kanwar in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist,” in Amar Kanwar—The Sovereign Forest, Daniela Zyman, ed. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 68. 64  Dastur, quoted in Amar Kanwar—The Sovereign Forest, Daniela Zyman, ed. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 236. 60 61

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each other, indiscernible to human viewers. Yet along the lines of Harman’s formulation, they are also withdrawn, manifesting an inner life that lies beyond comprehension. The exploitation of Odisha’s resources, Kanwar’s film argues, will erase the kind of multifarious nonhuman epistemologies that comprise such a landscape. The imagery that populates the film supports these conclusions. Tall grasses sway in the wind, silhouetted against an overexposed bleached-out sky. They move to the sound of water, of waves lapping on some unexplored shore. Close-ups of the grasses throughout the film give a sense of a world in perpetual motion, alive with possibility and independent of the actions of corporate interests, states, and other entities. Dilip Varma’s camera focuses on another plant: a ripe berry, a spiked stem—hinting at a landscape in peril, but with a means to defend itself. Other scenes focus on a flowing river, industrial structures at night, cows making their way across a desert, a man on a bicycle seen through tall grasses. Once again, I suggest the ontographic technique of the list to make sense of the visuals in The Scene of Crime. As with Maya Lin’s What is Missing? and Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World series, Kanwar’s imagery is tantalizingly disjunctive. Humans, animals, plants, and other nonhumans populate a world devoid of smooth transitions, the incomplete system that accounts for the separateness of each discrete object. In building this visual panoply, Kanwar’s film reveals itself as more than an exercise in new materialist thought and object-oriented ontologies. The images are overlaid with text that tells a parallel story, one that weaves with the images, often undermining or realigning them.65 The titles then 65  The full text is as follows: “There is a map of Kalinga in the corner of her eye/across the fields, past the tree, down the river/she always sees him coming/The suddenness of his departure is still hard to believe/The river was opened out into the sea yesterday/it took four days of digging to clear the sand/She yearns for him every day/The judge refused to accept the evidence of his murder/so he is neither dead nor alive/She searches desperately for him/ sometimes amongst the dead/and sometimes amongst the living/She sees him in everything./The days were filled with uncertainty/The nights were endless/They would meet where the fireflies filled the trees/He said his friend Nidhan had found old land records/the seal was dated 1897/He told her, we have a sound bomb/that would make a noise just to scare, without causing injury/she told him about the police and a Rapid Acquisition Force/ that could acquire the land within a day/1. Measurement of land/2. Calculations/3. Demolition/4. Eviction/5. Acquisition/There is a map of Kalinga in the corner of her eye/ The scene of the crime refuses to leave her mind/the judge still refuses to accept the evidence of the murders/she wanders, collecting all her witnesses/One night she had a strange dream/In the far distance was Nidhan’s house/The house was filled with a hundred maps of Kalinga/Photographs and newspaper clippings were all over the walls/It was here that she wept for the first time/They talked about him for many months/and so began preparations for the trial/The Sovereign Forest vs. The Union of India.”

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direct the viewer to see the skeleton of a narrative, propelled by the focus on landscape. The text alludes to a disappearance, a presumed murder, and an unnamed woman left behind to grieve. One phrase, “she sees him in everything,” gives the viewer a clue as to how to read the landscape imagery. It is both an establishment of the scene of crime and the search for what has been lost. Nineteen minutes into The Scene of Crime, Kanwar gives the viewer a sense of the “crime” under consideration: switching from his static camera to archival footage of armed men running and frantically shouting. The camera shakes violently, as it captures a scene of protest and police action from behind foliage. This vantage point echoes earlier moments in the film in which the camera surveys a scene through grasses, palm fronds, or other plants. The archival footage ends, and the rhythm of the earlier scenes resumes. The camera focuses on a memorial marker, and then moves on to industrial structures, including a mine lit up in the darkness. The text then turns to intimations of violence and the larger conflict at hand: “He told her, we have a sound bomb/that would make a noise just to scare, without causing injury/she told him about the police and a Rapid Acquisition Force/that would acquire the land within a day.” The final six minutes of the film build up to an extended shot of a picturesque tree framed against a wispy sky (Fig.  4.4). A sea of velvet grasses lines the lower portion of the frame, “they talked about him for many months/and so began preparations for the trial/The Sovereign Forest vs. The Union of India.” A slow fade out begins, and then an abrupt cut to black. This final text orients the viewer to the nature of the conflict that has, to this point in the video, only been referenced obliquely. Odisha is, by most metrics, at the margins of Indian politics and economic policy, one of the poorest states in the country.66 Kanwar’s visuals, then, give viewers a glimpse of a doubly marginalized population. The protests against Vedanta briefly cast the state and its tribal inhabitants into the national discourse. Prior to the agitation, Vedanta had acquired the homes and lands of 118 people, as well as the agricultural lands of another 1220; if permitted, further mining would go on to destroy sacred tribal sites.67 With the invocation of the upcoming “trial,” The Scene of Crime invokes the court cases that decided the forest’s fate.

 Macdonald et al., 45.  Macdonald et al., 46.

66 67

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Fig. 4.4  Amar Kanwar, Scene of Crime (2011). Still from digital video

The interplay of image and text gives the film its rhetorical heft and a direction for its critique. The violence enacted upon the landscape is also directed at its inhabitants. It is an outgrowth of the destructive force of colonialism “built into this founding moment. … It transposed political demands onto a time axis that forced the indigenous population to inhabit life-worlds that have never been theirs, while at the same time preventing them from fully making them their own.”68 Not solely a visual poem of interconnected imagery that hints at a landscape on the brink of destruction, The Scene of Crime serves as a testimony, hinting at the richness of these life-worlds—entanglements of human and nonhuman alike—that have been lost to the demands of a rapidly modernizing state. In being forced to inhabit such different life-worlds, the tribal inhabitants of the forest undergo a process of de- and re-classification. Their status is alternately referred to as “scheduled,” legally marking their existence 68  Monika Halkort, “Expressive Sovereignty” in Amar Kanwar—The Sovereign Forest, Daniela Zyman, ed. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015), 63.

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as disadvantaged. At the same time, preservationist rhetoric permeates the committee report about the land. It would appear, then, that these forests and their tribal inhabitants complicate the state’s desire to classify its citizens into distinct categories. Tribal lands evade binary distinctions, falling into neither “culture” nor “nature,” but occupying both realms simultaneously. This slippage applies to the occupants of these lands and has material effects on their legal rights. The logical fallacy of such classification exposes what Barad terms the “materializing effects of boundary-­ making practices” through the process of “intra-action.”69 An “intra-action” (as opposed to interaction) entails a single entity that is subdivided through an “agential cut” that creates a condition of “exteriority-­within-phenomena” rather than a binary subject-object distinction.70 Identity becomes a matter of exteriority-within, being “multiple within itself” or “diffracted through itself”71 rather than formed in opposition to some fully exterior phenomenon. The landscape depicted in Kanwar’s Scene of Crime is emblematic of this “exteriority-within.” Its scenery, while purportedly hinting at nonhuman epistemologies, in essence locates those purported exteriorities within the human-centered and human-altered landscape. Without the binary of human/nonhuman to rely upon, we come to understand that these make up a single, constantly shifting, multiplying, and diffracting identity. With Barad in mind, we see that Kanwar portrays not just a landscape on the edge, but a border ecology. The Scene of Crime presents viewers with a quiet space, one in which they must pay close attention to the denizens of the margins in order to sense the conflict that is coming. The point of view is one of and from those margins, frequently glimpsing one object behind or through another, spying on interactions but never directly engaging. In other cases, a change of focus reveals objects previously hidden from view, as in one scene that begins with a close up of a plant against the night sky and then, within the same frame, reveals the glowing moon as the plant blurs into obscurity. Accordingly, viewers are positioned as interlopers, constantly moving through and negotiating an unfamiliar environment. At the same time, the vantage points also indicate a pre-­ established familiarity with the land, indicating that we are decidedly of 69  Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Kon & Forskning No 1–2 (2012), 32. 70  Ibid. All emphasis Barad’s. 71  Ibid. All emphasis Barad’s.

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this place as well. This shifting perspective, much like Manthan’s privileging of local knowledges and religious practices, places viewers in the position of the purported “object of study” (to use Mignolo’s term) or “exterior” (to paraphrase Barad). Viewers recognize themselves as part of this other, experiencing a shared precarity. This questioning and renegotiation of identity within Kanwar’s piece is not limited to an ontological matter. The title and closing text remind viewers that a crime has been committed and a trial shall commence. Instead of a metaphor for environmental devastation in general, this serves as a specific reference to the legal process accompanying land rights activism in Odisha. With the project’s overarching title—The Sovereign Forest— Kanwar questions whether the natural can ever be separate from the purview of the state. The biopolitical ramifications of the conflict in Odisha extend not just to the human inhabitants of the forest, but its inhabitants at all levels. The Scene of Crime, specifically, evinces a complex relationship between the legal system, the material world, and those entities (human and nonhuman alike) seeking representation. Legality factors into Manthan as well, but in an absurdist manner. In 2017, the High Court of the North Indian state of Uttarakhand declared the Ganges and Yamuna rivers to be living entities, with all the rights accorded to human beings. In response, environmental journalist and activist Brij Khandelwal asked the police in Agra to register a case of “attempted murder” against the district magistrate, divisional commissioner, and general manager of the city.72 Citing misuse of funds set aside for sewage treatment plants, Khandelwal drew a link between government negligence and the Yamuna’s apparent death. On the surface, this seems a particularly clever exercise harnessing the power of spectacle, buttressed by a hyperbolic claim that nonetheless points to an underlying truth. Instead, I would argue that this legal thread adds another dimension to this rich entanglement of human and nonhuman, social and material, that constitutes the Yamuna. Reading Manthan against these later developments encourages the viewer to place the river within a matrix of competing interests: religion, industry, environmentalists, the judicial system, and the state, as well as a panoply of other organisms and nonhuman matter. 72  Hemendra Chaturvedi, “Environmentalist seeks FIR for ‘attempt to murder’ Yamuna river, now a living entity.” Hindustan Times, March 26, 2017. https://www.hindustantimes. com/lucknow/environmentalist-seeks-fir-for-attempt-to-murder-yamuna-river-now-a-­­ living-entity/story-LyBfVvZpv9OiuKgSSqFULK.html

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Conclusions The entanglements brought forth in Manthan and The Scene of Crime reveal that there is no individual human recourse or agency within the larger context of environmental crisis. Each action taken is inspired and determined by material, legal, social, and religious systems that intersect in places like the Yamuna River or the forests of Odisha. Picturing ecological crisis, alluding to its scale and urgency, cannot on its own muster real change, even at the level of the aggregate. Instead, as Galhotra depicts in Manthan, such systems must change in tandem. The sacred and the profane, her video argues, do not need defining; rather, they must be analyzed as entangled in order to understand the paradoxical status of the river and the larger question of environmental justice. To address the crisis encapsulated by the dying Yamuna requires understanding how that pollution— industrial effluents, human waste, religious detritus—accumulates, each act of accumulation justifying the next. The status of the river as sacred is not tangential to its rehabilitation, but integral, an interplay of immanence and transcendence that reenacts spiritual communion. With the symbolic churning of the Ocean of Milk in the Yamuna, Galhotra reorients religious priorities around environmental ones and asks viewers to consider their own responsibility for that initial paradox: how a river so beloved can be dying so profoundly. Accordingly, the piece reinserts politics into religious observance. If the performers’ symbolic churning can dredge some minuscule portion of the toxins from the Yamuna, then how could a large-scale effort work, and what barriers would need to be removed in order to accomplish it? The slow motion of the film comes into play here, as the reduced speed lulls the viewer into the ritual, as would a chant, temple circumambulation, or another devotional action. In Galhotra’s view of the problem, the paradox of the polluted sacred river can only be undone by organizing religion around new hierarchies. It is significant, then, that the performers bear no signs of traditional religion; they are neither mystic holy men nor established pandits. Their black wetsuits, accented with neon, are the garb of a new order, one devoted to reversing decades of neglect.

CHAPTER 5

Border Crossers

The preceding chapter discussed Amar Kanwar’s video The Scene of Crime (2011), part of his multimedia Sovereign Forest installation (2012). One moment from this piece helps to establish the border crossing metaphor that will guide this chapter. Fourteen minutes into The Scene of Crime, the title “Map 4” appears. A boat prow is set against water, as the river undulates gently. Overlaid text proclaims, “The river is the only witness to what she feels.” The rest of the boat slowly comes into view, tethered by a frayed rope. The camera then shifts to a close-up of this rope, a move that seems to allude to the precarity of the linkages between humans and the land they inhabit. Everything in the scene moves of its own accord, propelled by the river. The film then transitions to the next “map,” and never returns to the boat or any recognizable part of this landscape. When Kanwar labels his unnamed river a “witness,” this anthropomorphism applies both to the physical proximity of the river to the film’s female protagonist and to its ability to convey this message beyond that initial location. The river flows downstream, seeps into the earth, joins other tributaries, and in doing so, defies human attempts at confinement. In one sense, then, the river possesses its own ability to transgress established boundaries. Yet such rivers also draw and redraw borders as their volume fluctuates. The concept of the watershed, rather than a neatly defined river, requires us to conceive of a network of tributaries, canals, irrigation ditches, sewers, and other features that distort and amplify the waters’ reach.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. N. Sheren, Border Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1_5

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In one of the artworks I analyze in this chapter, a river is used to define an amorphous boundary zone—a watershed in flux. For their multimedia project Watershed Cairns (2011–present) artists Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan engage the concept of the shifting boundary region and that of the border crosser. Reuter and Rowan photograph glass cairns placed in different areas of the Mississippi River watershed, beginning with the St. Louis area and extending northward to locations in Minnesota. Another project that hinges on the ontological properties of border crossing is the interactive web-based documentary Bear 71 (2012), directed by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes and sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada. Both Bear 71 and Watershed Cairns consider nomadic entities that undertake a physical journey and in doing so transgress and mark boundaries in the landscape. In the case of Watershed Cairns, the objects also straddle the line between animate and inanimate, instilling that distinction with a new vitality. For Bear 71, the female bear chronicled in the documentary lives and remains within a well-defined area. The crossings of humans are what threaten her existence. The film’s online platform invites viewers to cross the boundary between the material and the virtual, as well as the human and nonhuman. These movements are also epistemological in nature, as Walter Mignolo reminds us. In his theory of border thinking, outlined in Local Histories/ Global Designs (2000) and elaborated in later years, Mignolo proposes that the border is itself a knowing entity that does not require outside interpretations. Traversing the border zone, crossing boundaries, and assuming the status of the border dweller are all actions that create new forms of knowledge. In crossing boundaries, we learn more about them, including their breaking points, the extent of their porosity, and the places in which they hold fast. In turn, we, as crossers, come to understand ourselves in relationship to these borders. In my earlier work I have taken these ideas further, expanding the concept of border thinking as it applies to visual art, using the work of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo in the San Diego-Tijuana region.1 The performances of the collective served as a means to understand the self-theorization of the

1  See Ila N.  Sheren, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera Since 1984 (University of Texas Press, 2015), also Ila N.  Sheren, “Border Art” in the Blackwell Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, Robin Greeley and Alejandro Anreus, eds. 385-397 (Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming Fall 2019).

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border-as-community versus the dominant media perception of the border-as-warzone. A border ecology has potential to expose and ultimately reverse that osmotic flow of power relations described by Mignolo and quoted in the introduction to this book. He writes of the “power differential ‘between’ the two sides of the border” from which “border epistemology emerges.”2 Here, Mignolo describes the dynamic between colonial power and colonial subject, or in disciplinary language, the observer and the observed. Reworking this into my idea of a border ecology entails a shift, the power differential now flows multidirectionally between human and nonhuman, between animate and inanimate. These binaries, simplified for the moment, generate that flow of power. However, following Mignolo, one must remain attuned to that initial imbalance of power between different groups of humans. The task remains to gauge the flow of power between humans and nonhumans while also accounting for the inequalities within these categories. This chapter will draw on two very different examples to show how inanimate matter and nonhuman animals alike can reflect back on human power relations within a larger discussion of ecological crisis. In both artworks, this task is accomplished by mobile entities, border crossers in themselves, that open the viewer up to nonhuman priorities and reorganize the world. Borders imply crossings, or at least the potential for such movement. This crossing relates to Jane Bennett’s idea of enchantment, which I first discussed in Ch. 1. For Bennett, enchantment “entails a state of wonder, and…the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement.”3 She discusses a varied cast of characters including a talking parrot, Kafka’s ape-man Rotpeter, and Deleuze and Guattari’s body-­ without-­organs. These trans-species attachments entail surprise and generate a connection to something the viewer has previously disregarded, their “charm” energizing a “social conscience.”4 In Bennett’s view, the act of de-centering integral to enchantment strengthens the moral compact between humans and the nonhuman matter that surrounds them. The idea of crossings, which Bennett describes as trans- or inter-species 2  Walter D. Mignolo, quoted in Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou, ‘An Exchange: Questions from Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou and answers from Walter Mignolo,’ in Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry, eds, Design in the Borderlands, Routledge, New York, 2014, p 174. 3  Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 4  Ibid., 32.

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morphing, is integral to enchantment, for “their magic resides in their mobility” and such metamorphosis enacts the “possibility of change” and carries “the trace of dangerous but also exciting and exhilarating migrations.”5 The language of border crossing permeates that of new materialism. In a border ecology, such crossings and the crossers themselves link new materialism with border epistemology. In Bennett’s enchantment (and later vital materialism), the reliance upon a sense of wonder and the affective potential of such crossings is centered on a privileged human subject. Border thinking acknowledges the power differentials implied by yet unresolved in the political power of enchantment. Bringing a new materialist lens to the concept of border thinking, in turn, enlarges the scope of border crossers and allows for multiple theories of the border, including shifting forms of identification and disidentification that encompass the ecological as well as the decolonial. The privileged viewer is de-­ centered and immersed within the logic of a border ecology that includes intersecting systems and their moving parts. This is accomplished, paradoxically, through the figure of the border crosser, who may or may not itself be singular.

Watershed Cairns In a photograph titled Silver Creek Spire—Pond (2013) (Fig. 5.1), the sun rises over a mist-filled marshy landscape. The horizon line is elevated slightly, indicating the low placement of the camera, and consequently, the viewer. In the central foreground of the image, a vertically oriented glass object rises out of the shallow, still water. Upon further inspection, it becomes apparent that the object is not a single piece, but several assembled into a whole. There are at least four individual vases, colorless and dark green, nested alternately upside down and upright, and topped with a green bell. The resulting image is an interplay of transparency and reflection. The golden light picks out details of the grassy stalks, the feathery clouds, and the curvilinear surfaces of the glass vases. The overall ambience is serene, quiet, and intimate. Viewers are engaged in a close relationship with the landscape but are given no clues as to the specific location or orientation.

5

 Ibid., 17.

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Fig. 5.1  Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, Silver Creek Spire - Pond (2013) from the series Watershed Cairns (2011–present)

That central object, the stacked glasses, is a cairn, indicating a point of significance in a larger landscape. The cairn gives direction to a journey and provides confirmation that the traveler is on a marked path. On hiking trails, cairns are frequently comprised of stacked rocks constituting a symbolic language of direction and boundary-marking. Glass, however, is an odd material for this purpose—it is decidedly other, not of the scene. It is also fragile, not built to withstand the vicissitudes of an unforgiving climate. Vases are a significant choice for the cairn. Formally, their shape allows for a vertical rise, and conceptually, the idea of a vessel yet to be filled resonates visually with the surrounding water. The manufactured glass pieces indicate not only human presence, but also the history of mass production and consumer desire. The vases and bell could be antique heirlooms or knockoffs, treasured or discarded. In either case, they have been repurposed into something entirely new, an art object lacking utility but brimming with meaning. When set against the rest of the series Watershed Cairns, at present marking over 400 different locations along the Mississippi, Missouri, and

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Ohio Rivers, the significance of the cairns comes into focus. This ongoing multimedia project, begun in 2011 by artist Libby Reuter and photographer Joshua Rowan, draws connections between sculpture, photography, and Internet-based art. Each cairn marks a moment in a watershed; they denote points of remote beauty, cascading tributaries, traces of human intervention, and industrial scenes. The cairns map the extent of the waters’ reach, erasing many established boundary lines and instituting new ones in their place. In doing so, they reorient the world in a way that de-­ centers human priorities about water in favor of more holistic human-­ object interaction. Those objects, significantly, cross borders, traversing metropolitan areas, venturing underground and into other liminal spaces, and in doing so trace more than just the watershed. Reuter and Rowan began extending their project to document the upper Mississippi in the summer of 2016, followed by the Missouri and Ohio watersheds, but this chapter will consider only their original 60 photographs within the St. Louis region. Reuter and Rowan’s choice of the Mississippi River, particularly the Mississippi-Missouri confluence, is hugely symbolic within U.S. history. The river at this junction acts as a physical and metaphorical dividing line, separating Illinois from Missouri, East from West, and “civilization” from “frontier.” St. Louis’s Gateway Arch, formally titled the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, marks a threshold from which settlers went forth to fulfill a version of Manifest Destiny. In doing so, they claimed the lands of indigenous tribes, inflicting unfathomable suffering and pushing them to the nation’s periphery. Even construction of the Arch itself displaced hundreds of the city’s residents, destroying over 200 residential buildings in a predominantly Black neighborhood and marking an ongoing pattern of property divestment that continues to this day. In literature, the Mississippi River is deeply romanticized, the narrative propulsion for Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and the locus for the formation of a uniquely “American” identity. Accordingly, the river figures symbolically in nineteenth-century landscape painting, from Seth Eastman’s watercolor studies of the upper Mississippi to George Caleb Bingham’s portrayals of river life at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi. These picturesque images helped to encode nineteenth-­ century Euro-American values into the landscape and back onto the river itself. Yet the river also marked St. Louis as a key site for the exchange and trade of enslaved people. Post-Civil War histories of St. Louis focus on its rise and fall. The year of 1904 was a high water mark for the city’s visibility due to the Olympics

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and World’s Fair, although the population actually peaked in 1950, at over 850,000. Coupled with the infamous “white flight” to the suburbs, which historian Walter Johnson has argued was really a matter of “Black removal,” this depopulation revealed an urban area sharply divided along racial and class lines. A combination of historical statutes, such as a 1916 ban on racial integration in housing, the “racial covenants” that kept desirable real estate in white hands, and a series of unwritten regulations, have encoded these borders in the very material of the city.6 Wealthy neighborhoods within the city limits, including the gentrified Central West End, are rife with barricaded private streets and manufactured dead ends limiting access from the racially coded North. The Mississippi River marks an equally significant boundary within the metro area, as it splits the East, including East St. Louis (IL) and its majority Black population, from the West. At first sight, with its focus on the environment, Watershed Cairns is ostensibly removed from contemporary debates about structural and institutional racism. However, the series rests on a foundation of urban infrastructural inequality, the cyclical (and unequal) effects of floods, and concerns over equity in resource allocation. Several of the Cairns even populate the same pavement later occupied by protesters. The watershed, through the motion of the river and its tributaries, connects St. Louis’s disparate regions. By marking the watershed and tracing the extent of its boundaries, Watershed Cairns provides viewers with an ecocritical lens through which to approach structural inequalities. The Cairns and their photographic documentation comprise a set of powerful and expressive objects designed to render the margins visible. Without overwriting the visible narratives created by the Black Lives Matter movement and other progressive efforts, this project can be thought of in tandem with the political work of artists like Damon Davis, De Andrea Nichols, and Mallory Nezam, who helped redefine the art of post-Ferguson St. Louis. Watershed Cairns has a significant role to play in generating awareness of both a specific climate issue—the Mississippi River watershed—and reading ecological thought through decolonial discussions of imbalance and power. Watershed Cairns can be understood through the dual frameworks of Bennett’s aesthetic of enchantment and Mignolo’s border thinking while transcending their limitations. Enchantment, as I have laid out, 6  Jeffrey E. Smith, A Preservation Plan for St. Louis Part I: Historic Contexts. (September 1995) https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/planning/culturalresources/preservation-plan/Part-I-African-American-Experience.cfm.

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emphasizes border crossings and interspecies transgressions in order to generate a moral framework for human-nonhuman relations. Bennett’s more well-known contribution to the study of objects, what she terms “vital materialism,” uncovers their inner vitality. I quoted from her 2010 study Vibrant Matter in Chap. 3 including her amazement at witnessing the shimmering essence of the debris in a storm drain. Bennett’s acknowledgment of the object defined on its own terms, separate from that of the observing subject, resonates with Mignolo’s privileging of the thought process of the object of study and its apparent inscrutability to the Western observer. Watershed Cairns illustrates how art can bridge these two approaches to the subject-object divide, even reconciling them in the process. The stacked glass cairns exemplify an aesthetic of enchantment, in Bennett’s term, and hint at the potential that these liminal spaces—or border regions in Mignolo’s words—have to generate a new ethical imperative for the Mississippi watershed and a divided St. Louis.

Crossing from the Material to the Virtual Borders function on many levels within Watershed Cairns, serving as a unifying theme behind the entire project. Through their approach, Reuter and Rowan map physical borders, fluid watershed boundaries, and symbolic divides. The project also bridges the ontological gap between virtual and material. More specifically, although physically installed in a number of local institutions including the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mt. Vernon, IL, and the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, MO, in 2014 and early 2015, the project is also located online (www.watershedcairns. com), and the project’s website gives the precise locations of all photographs. Viewer-participants can use the included GPS data to seek out these sites. An earlier version of the site contained a map updated with location markers. In this manner, Watershed Cairns encourages a connection, a continuum, between virtual and physical space. The website is an integral part of the larger whole, conveying information and providing a virtual site from which the viewer can set off on their individual journey. Internet-based artists have long interrogated the aesthetics and authority of the map, and the connection of Internet art with mapping dovetails with that of the World Wide Web as a means and metaphor for global connectivity. Mid-1990s Net.art frequently employed map graphics, whether in JODI.org’s wwww.jodi.org (1995), or Heath Bunting’s Visitor’s Guide to

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London (1995).7 Travel-centric projects such as Stephan Huber and Felix Pocock’s Arctic Circle Double Travel (1994)8 and Eva Wohlgemuth, Tatjana Didenko, and Kathy Rae Huffman’s Siberian Deal (1995)9 sought to transgress the boundaries of virtual and physical space. The latter two projects drew linkages between the liminal arctic landscapes through which they passed and the virtual audience following along. A decade later, artist Aram Bartholl critiqued the standardization of Google Maps and its inherent programming biases with his Map series (2006–2010). By pulling Google’s red location icon from virtual space and installing it as a sculptural intervention in various city centers (Arles and Taipei, among others), Bartholl enacted another kind of crossing from the virtual plane to the material world, one that was more object-focused than anthropocentric. Artists such as Clement Valla, Mishka Henner, and Jon Rafman have launched similar critiques of mapping and corporate interest, mining this territory since the early 2010s.10 Set against these more conceptually ambitious Internet works, the Watershed Cairns website could read simply as a promotional tool for the project, an online gallery for visitors to visit once their museum visit has ended. Aesthetically, the site is straightforward, and it relies more upon textual explanation than visual cues. One is free to browse the images, and then locate them on a map of the Saint Louis region. The artists question neither the map’s authority nor the technological apparatus behind the GPS coordinates they give. Yet the site serves to augment each of the photographs from the series. Upon browsing the image gallery, the viewer finds that the Silver Creek Spire image was taken at Silver Creek Preserve, south of Mascoutah, IL, with the coordinates N38.470211 W089.824936. A description offered by Reuter and Rowan states: A foggy dawn in the wetlands south of Mascoutah, Illinois reveals the green glass of the Silver Creek Spire Cairn. Occasional jets from nearby Scott Air Force Base were only temporary interruptions to the croaking of frogs, the flittering of dragonflies and butterflies, and the sound of a small animal skittering through tall grasses.11  http://www.irational.org/heath/london/front.html  http://arcticcircle.philippocock.net/acircle.htm 9  http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/1687/index.html 10  See Clement Valla’s series Postcards from Google Earth (2011–2013), Mishka Henner’s Dutch Landscapes (2013), and Jon Rafman’s Nine  Eyes of Google Street View (2009–ongoing). 11  Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, ‘Silver Creek Spire - Pond,’ http://watershedcairns. com/images/silver-creek-spire-pond/ 7 8

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A thumbnail image demystifies the cairn, showing Reuter placing it in position. The map reveals Mascoutah to be toward the boundary of the project, about 30 miles from downtown Saint Louis. The description of Silver Creek Spire bears closer inspection, because the language reveals value judgments about human-nonhuman hierarchies and the nature of human priorities. Noting the proximity to Scott Air Force Base seems initially to be an afterthought, a contrast to the more idyllic depiction of frogs, dragonflies, and the “small animal skittering” in the grass. But that “occasional” jet grounds this landscape in its immediate context and sets up its relationship to the human population of the region. Awareness of the watershed, its reach, and its effects on the surroundings is key to this project, as well as understanding human impact on the river. By noting the sound of the Air Force jets, Reuter and Rowan remind the viewer that there is no such thing as nature separate from the human and that the serenity of Silver Creek is but an illusion. A second Silver Creek Spire photograph, this one subtitled “Roadside,” depicts the cairn in a dirt channel. The tall grasses of the preserve, along with wildflowers, grow to either side. This image lacks the ethereal mist of the “Pond” photograph, and the cairn blends almost completely into the greenery rather than providing a similar strong visual focus. Again, it is the website that demystifies the images, stating that “[i]t matters whether we call this a stream or a ditch. A stream is associated with nature, plants, and animals. A ditch is just a utilitarian way of getting water away from a place where it isn’t wanted.”12 Each cairn does double (or sometimes triple) duty, mapping related points connected by a common water source. The description as either a ditch or a stream is more than an aesthetic judgment, and the artists go on to classify this channel as a stream, for it nourishes wildlife and ultimately empties into Silver Creek. This passage underscores the ways that viewers assign value to the landscape through language. Something that is utilitarian, beneficial primarily to the humans that have created or exploited it, is labeled accordingly. A ditch moves away wastewater or floodwater, managing unwanted surplus. A stream connotes an idea of Romanticized nature existing solely to improve the lives of nonhumans, while bringing primarily aesthetic pleasure to the privileged human viewer. In a sense, this cairn marks an ontological boundary as well as the physical one, indicating that the lines between 12  Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, ‘Silver Creek Spire  - Roadside,’ http://watershedcairns.com/images/silver-creek-spire-roadside/

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human and nonhuman are, in fact, far more fluid and open to interpretation than initially conceived. Watershed Cairns establishes a dialogue between website, physical site, and an image, or representation, of that site. Though each of these aspects comprise a necessary part of Reuter and Rowan’s project, independently, they are incomplete. The connection between the three levels of the site, including the cairns’ installation and physical presence in the gallery space, evokes Robert Smithson’s concept of the Non-site. Smithson’s Non-sites of the 1960s and 1970s were fragments of earth, debris from quarries, and other mundane materials presented in the gallery space with a map indicating their origins. Described by Smithson as “an indoor Earthwork” and “a three-dimensional map of a site,”13 the Non-site was an attempt to circumvent the commodifying impulse of the gallery and reorient the viewer to the generative potential of the ordinary. Smithson’s Non-sites were taken most frequently from areas in New Jersey, a site generally ignored by the New York-centered elite. Although the Non-site existed in the gallery space, the act of leaving that space and making a pilgrimage to the Non-site’s origin would be, according to Smithson, “…invented, devised, artificial; therefore, one might call it a non-trip to a site from a Non-site.”14 As I have argued in Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera Since 1984 (2015), the relationship between site and non-site is Smithson’s attempt to resolve the tension between representation and abstraction. Following this logic, regarding Watershed Cairns, I would add that the Non-site allows the artist to question the authority of established artistic boundaries.15 The Non-sites deal with materials originating at a specific site, yet returning to the non-site’s origin, art world pilgrims would find something artificial or otherwise manipulated about the land. Smithson upended expectations of a pristine origin in favor of manufactured ones, in this way blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial, site and non-site. This dynamic extended past the non-site conceit and into other gallery-based works. For example, in Smithson’s Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis) (1969), he installed shards of broken glass in the gallery 13  Robert Smithson, quoted in Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004, p 131. 14  Ibid. 15  Ila Nicole Sheren, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera Since 1984, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 2015, p 63-66.

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space, labeling the resulting object a map of an imaginary territory. The Map has been linked to Smithson’s interest in crystallography and has been interpreted as a possible prefiguration of the salt crystals in Spiral Jetty (1970).16 Although the jagged forms of the glass shards possibly reflect this, Map also relays a similar transgression of boundaries. The glass’ materiality is transparent and makes no claim to a specific origin. Map marks an imaginary territory, delineates a jagged, fragmented border, and implies a fantastical journey. Border crossing, from an imaginary continent like Atlantis or across the conceptual non-trips to New Jersey quarries, pervades Smithson’s work. The fragmented glass shards of Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis) form a material continuity between his conceptual site-specificity and the cairns in Watershed Cairns. In an ecological sense, the Mississippi is not solely a river, but an entire watershed, and an amorphous zone rather than a clearly defined border. In St. Louis, the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers converge, as do smaller tributaries such as the Des Peres and the Meramac. Water complicates the idea of borders, it seeps through cracks, it levels floodplains and mountains alike. It also deepens divisions and redefines them. Instead of a simple demarcating line, and its imagery of a well-defined border, the watershed is always in flux and therefore porous. The deregulated nature of the term “boundary” could apply, but that also falls short of indicating the temporal quality of the watershed. For Reuter and Rowan’s Silver Creek Spire, temporality adds another layer to the complexity of the relationship between the glass cairn, its image, and its online representation. The photograph becomes an indicator of the river’s long journey. The water flows from its origin in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and down various tributaries along the Great Plains toward its destination in the Gulf of Mexico. However, the sense of an uninterrupted journey is misleading, for the water is routed to farms, suburban housing developments, and cities. The watershed disbands the linear trajectory of the river and provides a much stronger metaphor for interconnectedness than division. Silver Creek Preserve is one such connected location. Thirty miles east of the Mississippi, and within the aural reach of an Air Force Base, it still experiences the river’s influence. The tension between such connectivity and division mimics that found within St. Louis society, its urban framework, and its complex politics of race and class. In doing so, the watershed’s 16  Ron Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2004, p 78-79.

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ambiguity gives viewers a language with which to address that of human relationships. The journey of the cairn, both physical and metaphorical, is the journey of border crosser, a denizen of the periphery. The cairn in the photograph is the same object that resides in the gallery space, but by placing it in the Silver Creek waters, the artists have enacted a secular baptism. It is an object that has traveled to the points depicted in the photographs and accrued layers of meaning. The next logical action on the part of the viewer is to complete the cycle, journeying to the site of Silver Creek Spire - Pond and, in doing so, making an ecologically minded “Non-trip.” Perhaps the viewer will note the overhead jets or the sounds of wildlife, and ultimately develop an awareness of the watershed’s reach, its influence, and, most importantly, its fragility. I made such a “non-trip” in late spring of 2021. As I drove to the site, near Mascoutah, IL, in Spring of 2021, I was confronted not by a pristine pond, or even the sound of those “occasional jets” flying overhead as reminders of the base. Instead, along the side of Interstate 64, before reaching Silver Creek Preserve, was a flooded forest—part of the same ecosystem captured by Rowan’s lens. Nailed into each tree lining the highway, however, was a simple sign, “TRUMP 2020.” The mass of trees, insisting on fighting an election that was long since decided, declared the falsity of any claim to separate nonhuman ecology from human priorities. These seemingly apolitical trees were enlisted in service of a vision of the United States that devalues Black, non-white, and immigrant lives and takes an extractive approach to the environment. The lesson was stark: at no point in the watershed are we too remote for the ramifications of human politics. The watershed and its denizens—including its human residents—exist in an ongoing state of precarity. To reckon with the ecological crisis, the series seems to argue, is to deal with the challenges posed by place.

Border Thinking and Vital Materialism An elongated horizontal photograph titled Elsah Flood, June 2013 is a departure from Reuter and Rowan’s more serene settings. In this image, the cairn, a hollow spherical vessel, floats down a flooded tributary, past a gathering of trees, a yellow road sign, and a home. This colorless cairn, with few clues to its scale, could be comprised of a fishbowl, a light bulb cover, or something much larger. It is unclear from the photograph which direction the water is flowing, whether the cairn obeys the directional

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sign, with its arrow pointing left, or floats blithely unaware of such attempts at regulation. The floodwaters are an opaque brown and contrast with the cairn’s transparency. The viewer, positioned within the water, has no vantage point from which to survey the scene. They become part of the flood, carried away on its currents. Unlike the targeted specificity of the other images, Elsah Flood revels in ambiguity. The accompanying text available on the website reads: Residents of the picturesque town of Elsah, Illinois, have become accustomed to floods…. When heavy rainfall in the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi watersheds combine, the Mississippi River backs up, pouring additional water into Elsah. In the last several years, preparing for and cleaning up from the muddy water has become an almost annual chore, but heavy rains made this the second flood of the year.17 A second Elsah image, a close-up of the cairn with flooded houses in the background and out-of-focus, is titled Elsah Flood Houses, June 2013. On the website, this image is accompanied by a short poem attributed to Ben Moeller-Gaa: “broken levee—/someone’s fishbowl now/full of clouds.”18 Moeller-Gaa refers to the reflection of the sky in the spherical vessel and plays with the idea that the empty glass cairn can, in fact, hold multitudes. In a sense, the poem models the process of meaning-making, how interpretations accrue and fill the glass vessels. In 1993, the Mississippi River flooded for five months across portions of nine different states, inundating a total of 6.6 million acres. The cause was excessive rainfall in the upper Mississippi River Basin, but the extent was exacerbated by the centuries-long loss of wetlands in the region.19 With 38 deaths, $15 billion in damages (in 1993 dollars), $6 billion in recovery costs, 100,000 damaged homes, and 10,000 others destroyed, at the time it was the largest flood in U.S. history.20 Although the memory of that seminal flood remains embedded in  local legend, the regular 17  Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, ‘Elsah Flood,’ http://watershedcairns.com/images/ elsah-flood/ 18  Ben Moeller-Gaa, ‘Elsah Flood Houses June 2013,’ http://watershedcairns.com/ cairns-in-verse/ This section of the Watershed Cairns site holds the results of a collaboration between the artists and a series of local poets. Each poem is inspired by a specific photograph, and the text is occasionally displayed alongside the appropriate print in gallery installations. 19  Gerald E.  Galloway, ‘Sharing the Challenge: Floodplain Management into the 21st Century’ (Galloway Report), Report of the Interagency Floodplain Management Review Committee to the Administration Floodplain Management Task Force, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, June 1994, p viii. 20  Lee W. Larson, ‘The Great USA Flood of 1993.’ Paper presented at IAHS Conference Destructive Water: Water-Caused Natural Disasters - Their Abatement and Control Anaheim,

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flooding of the Mississippi has continued apace. The Elsah floods of 2013 were part of a cyclical event, one that Reuter and Rowan reclassify with their text from headline-grabbing apocalypse to “annual chore.” Floods are intricately linked with discussions of boundaries, borders, and their transgression. Precisely because the waters fail to obey lines of demarcation, they complicate rules of order and logic. Biblically, floods signify the destruction of the earth, but also serve as a metaphor for a clean slate, a chance to start afresh. This notion was upended in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, in which the floodwaters exposed and exacerbated structural inequalities rather than leveling them altogether. Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World (discussed in Chap. 3) explored similar metaphors of flooding and leveling. Recall that the apocalyptic staging of such photographs as Chintra and Samundri Davi while a powerful visual indicator of climate change erased local experiences of the floods. The Elsah Flood, June 2013 photograph evinces several similarities to Mendel’s, including the elevated water line and the pitting of a hapless entity (in this case, the glass fishbowl cairn) against the larger forces of climate change. However, Rowan and Reuter’s reference to the “annual chore” of flood clean-up undoes the rhetorical heft of the flood photograph. It brings the scene closer to the lived experience of river dwelling. The interplay between image and didactic text finds further resonance with the debate surrounding the political import of the toxic sublime photography I summarized in the preceding chapter. Taken on its own, Elsah Flood, June 2013 privileges aesthetic contemplation. Yet, it is the didactic materials, the explication of the scene that is found online, that disrupts the turn toward aesthetics and sublimity. For Watershed Cairns, the text reorients the Elsah scene and strips it of its hyperbole. In the process Watershed Cairns realigns with the perspective of the border dweller, accustomed to a life of flux. In Watershed Cairns, the border dwellers are the cairns, the watershed and its denizens. The cairns serve as a locus of information. They unite the different components of the ecosystem and mark key nodes of interaction. Ultimately, their aesthetic qualities—transparency, fragility, and alien California, June 24–28, 1996. http://www.nwrfc.noaa.gov/floods/papers/oh_2/great. htm. See also Galloway, ‘Sharing the Challenge,’ op cit, p ix.

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Fig. 5.2  Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, FLOWer Sewer (2014) from the series Watershed Cairns (2011–present)

beauty—work to achieve Bennett’s aesthetic of enchantment and vitality. For example, the photograph FLOWer Sewer (2014) (Fig. 5.2) situates the FLOWer cairn beneath the surface of St. Louis, Missouri. The image is a haunting one, exaggerated by Rowan’s manipulation of light. Sunlight floods in from the upper left, illuminating the contours of an underground tunnel. The subterranean river, the trickle of the sewer, curves down and toward the viewer. Although the right-hand side of the photograph remains shrouded in murky blackness, a spotlight illuminates the cairn. The FLOWer cairn consists of alternating vertical vases and shallow plates or platters. The resulting object does appear to bloom—hence the play on words, flow/flower—and in this location resembles a kind of strange cave-­ dwelling plant. The FLOWer cairn’s coloring, saturated blue, orange, and green, stands out against the monochromatic background. Unlike the Silver Creek cairn, which blended into its green surroundings, this object is intended to be seen. Viewers glimpse hints of the cairn’s reflection in the still water below which lends a symmetry to this strange object. A sewer connotes abjection, but the visuals of the photograph counteract this

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association. The cavernous space depicted is enticing even as it is dark and mysterious. The subterranean river is calm and clean, and the light at the end of the tunnel is a reassuring sight. On the website, Reuter and Rowan distinguish this tunnel from the “sanitary sewers” carrying hazardous wastewater further underground. After a lengthy description of the location of this particular sewer and its construction, the accompanying text concludes: The two tunnels coming from Forest Park surface in an industrial area…The sanitary sewers continue below ground, following the concrete-­ lined River des Peres, carrying wastewater to a Metropolitan Sewer District treatment plant. Then, the decontaminated water is returned to the Mississippi River. This works most of the time, except during heavy rainfall when the excess combined sewage and storm water fill the Tubes and flow into the open, concrete-lined channel of the River des Peres and— untreated—into the Mississippi River.21 There is a disconnect, then, between the quiet subterranean world of the photograph and the disastrous scenario predicted by the text. Within the logic of Watershed Cairns, the FLOWer Cairn marks the motion of the sewer line, hence the “FLOW” of the cairn’s name. This sub-series maps the distribution of underground water throughout the St. Louis metro area, from the streets and storm drains to the Des Peres River and the Mississippi. The cairn makes its first appearances in FLOWer and FLOWer #2 (2012), perched on roadside storm drains. Reuter and Rowan reused the object for FLOWer Alley (2013), in which the cairn marks standing water in a brick-paved alley. These above-ground photographs are legible, with the cairn serving as a consistent symbol demarcating human manipulation of the water channels. It helps to recall the second photograph of the Silver Creek Spire series, accompanied by the definitions of “stream” and “ditch.” The FLOWer Cairn, then, marks something of an underground ditch, a way for civil engineers to rid the streets of unwanted water. This water is alternately life-giving and sustaining or hazardous untreated waste, depending on the degree of its entanglement with human beings. The FLOWer Cairn is a border crosser. It moves on the margins of the city and marks spaces just outside of the public gaze. It renders the unseen, seen and calls attention to the extent of human intervention. The FLOWer Sewer photograph is both a departure from the previous uses of the cairn 21  Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, ‘FLOWer Sewer,’ http://watershedcairns.com/ images/flower-sewer/

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and its logical continuation. The underground darkness renders the glass eerie, alien, and brimming with its own rich inner life. Within this aesthetic construct, the idea that the cairn glows with its own thought and could exist entirely apart from the artists’ intentions allows a reading in object-oriented or materialist terms. In its omnipresence, the FLOWer cairn could be classified as unruly. After all, it transgresses boundaries, moving from the public street to the liminal space of the sewer. It explores as it marks and does so seemingly without human intervention. In Reuter and Rowan’s staged photographs, the glass cairns take on a life of their own. They make their journey around the watershed one of disobedience, an almost willful refusal to cooperate with human priorities.

Glass, Light, and the Romantic Sublime As a whole, the Cairns facilitates an interplay of the material and immaterial, the physical properties of glass, and the ethereal quality of the light that activates each cairn. Reuter and Rowan’s photographs refer to the genre of Romantic landscapes in their composition and in their reliance on light as a spiritual vector. In doing so, one might assume that Reuter and Rowan fall back into earlier modes of representing the relationship between the human and the nonhuman as one of separation or mutual exclusion. But the incongruity of the cairns remains, as they complicate any preconceived binaries. In the gallery space, the cairns appear as nonhuman matter, pure objects. One finds a soup bowl here, a serving platter there, a decorative vase, a fishbowl, or even a scientific instrument. However, this doesn’t encompass the entirety of the cairns’ relationship with humans. The cairns are both manufactured and assembled. They are imbued with human characteristics that they personify through their border crossing nature and the act of bearing witness to the watershed. It is in the photographs, with their manipulated light and careful consideration of landscape, that the cairns become activated. Moving from image to image, the deeper the entanglement of human and nonhuman presents itself within the objects. Consider Park Bridge 2 (Fig. 5.3) and Tethys Meramec Stump (Fig. 5.4). In the first, a blue glass cairn sits perched over a meadow, a drainage stream runs down the center, reflecting back the silver sky. Although the sun cannot be seen within the frame, it is reflected in a teardrop-shaped vase that sits perched atop the cairn. The cairn appears to be consumed by an inner fire, a hint at the process by which the glass was initially shaped. Other

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Fig. 5.3  Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, Park Bridge 2 (2015) from the series Watershed Cairns (2011–present)

Fig. 5.4  Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, Tethys Meramec Stump (2014) from the series Watershed Cairns (2011–present)

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parts of the cairn pick up glints of light, highlighting the delicate ornament of a candelabra, the swell and sheen of a rounded blue vase, the softness of a frosted glass tray. The cairn contains a sunset within itself. In the second image, Tethys Meramec Stump, the “Tethys” cairn is placed atop a tree stump and surrounded by mossy water. The darkness of the surroundings gives the viewer a sense of a quiet forest floor, while a single light source illuminates both the stump and the cairn to dramatic effect. The entire composition is infused with a sense of individual communion with an untouched nature. It makes larger allusions to European Romanticism as well as the sylvan wanderings of Henry David Thoreau. The interplay of light and dark makes references to a spiritual communion as well. The tree stump serves as a kind of makeshift altar upon which the cairn could serve as offering. In each of those two photographs, along with Silver Creek Spire and FLOWer Sewer, light is used to dramatic effect, facilitated through and manipulated by the materiality of glass. At the chemical level, glass has an open, amorphous structure, allowing light to pass through. This transparency lends the cairn photographs their ethereal quality. Imagine this in addition to the multivalent border crossings at work in the series: material to digital, the scope of the watershed, water and land, all the way down to the molecular level. In Martin Richman’s description, glass is itself a figure of the in-between. It “gives access and denies access at the same time…it seems to be half way between one thing and another.”22 With its echo of a kind of material transpotentiality, Richman’s phrasing echoes Bennett’s vision of enchantment and its encoded rhetoric of crossings and attachment. If glass is an inherently enchanting substance, then one could ascribe it an affective capacity. Architect Peter Fink writes that “light and glass are such important modulators of space, opening up many different possibilities for exploration. People have a natural empathy with both…”23 It is this empathic bond that Reuter and Rowan construct through the staging of their photographs. Light imbues the glass with an inner vitality and

22  Martin Richman, in Glass, Light and Space: New proposals for the use of glass in architecture. Louise Taylor and Andrew Lockhart, Eds. (London: Crafts Council, 1997), 32. 23  Peter Fink, in Glass, Light and Space: New proposals for the use of glass in architecture. Louise Taylor and Andrew Lockhart, Eds. (London: Crafts Council, 1997), 23.

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renders the cairns neither human nor nonhuman, but an enchanted in-between. I find that the cairns, their vertical structure recalling diminutive towers, have a visual and conceptual antecedent in the utopian work of the German Expressionist architects known as Die Gläserne Kette (The Crystal Chain) (1919–1920). The group, led by architect Bruno Taut and writer Paul Scheerbart, exchanged a series of letters and manuscripts that detailed their plans for a new social order. Focusing on the form of the crystal and the properties of transparent colored glass, their visions fell along the lines of what architectural historian Iain Boyd Whyte terms “the expressionist sublime.”24 According to Whyte, it was the form of the crystal shrine that appears throughout the Crystal Chain’s writings “in endless guises as the axis mundi of the new utopia.”25 Group member Hans Scharoun depicted one such glass tower in a letter. Amid Scharoun’s expressive lines, the geometry of such a design—its modular form comprised of intersecting glass panels—echoes that of the Cairns almost a century later. It is not a stretch to see traces of that crystal shrine in Tethys Meramec Stump, which knowingly plays with viewers’ expectations of spirituality and communion. Scheerbart, author of the novella The Gray Cloth (1914) and the treatise Glass Architecture (1914), wrote that “water, because of its intrinsic capacity to reflect, belongs to glass architecture.”26 In Reuter’s and Rowan’s Watershed Cairns, water and glass are activated through each other. In the postwar era, glass lost many of these Romantic attachments. It appeared frequently in the sleek, minimalist finish exemplified in the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and his many followers. However, glass would reassert its ecological connections with the “hippie modernists” of the 1960s. In their proposal to cover Manhattan with an enormous glass dome, Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao described the resulting ecological effects: “From the inside there will be uninterrupted visual contact with the exterior world. The sun and moon will shine in the landscape and the sky will be completely visible, but the unpleasant effects 24  See Iain Boyd Whyte, “The Expressionist Sublime” in Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, ed. Timothy O. Benson (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993). 25  Iain Boyd Whyte, The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and his Circle (MIT Press, 1985), 133. 26  Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, Dennis Sharp, ed. (London, November Books, 1972), 57.

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of climate, heat, dust, bugs, glare, etc. will be modulated by the skin to provide a Garden of Eden interior.”27 The Edenic rhetoric reiterates the Romantic separation between human and nature and a hope of returning humans to that prelapsarian state. More striking is what Fuller and Sadao deem worthy of retaining (the relationship between human ritual and celestial movement, a common theme in glass architecture28), and what is unnecessary (“climate, heat, dust, bugs, glare”). The aesthetic and ecological underpinnings of the Watershed Cairns photographs are contingent upon the interplay of light and glass, and the inextricably Romantic associations it entails. According to Timothy Morton, the romanticization of nature was a trope that kept the human artificially distanced from the nonhuman, but also aided in the latter’s commodification.29 Landscape became an experience to be purchased and shared, with status acquired according to social protocols. Rather than envisioning an ecology devoid of such anthropocentric visions, however, Reuter and Rowan welcome its seductive aesthetics. The resulting photographs are lush, inviting, and lull viewers into false expectations of the messages they contain. Akin to the rhetoric of the “toxic sublime,” the project relies upon an aesthetic encounter to upend viewers’ expectations of a landscape. Rowan and Reuter may stage each individual photograph following a nineteenth-century aesthetic separation between the human and the nonhuman, but as a whole, the series presents a portrait of a deeply entangled existence. Through the website’s didactic materials and the call to join in the exploration and mapping of the watershed, viewers’ initial assumptions are upended in favor of a much more complex and intellectually challenging portrait of the St. Louis region. As border crossers, the cairns draw attention to spaces often neglected or underrepresented. By doing so, we are able to draw connections between the series and Karen Barad’s critique of how the human/nonhuman binary is constituted. As Barad argues, “the ‘posthumanist’ point is not to blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman, not to cross out all distinctions and differences, and not to simply invert humanism, but rather to understand the materializing effects of particular ways of 27  Buckminster Fuller, quoted in John Allowed, The Great Exhibitions, (London, Studio Vista, 1977), 169. 28  Joanne Stuhr, “Glass and Architecture” in The Art of Glass: Integrating Architecture and Glass, Stephen Knapp, ed. (Rockport Publishers, 1998), 10. 29  Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2007, p 85.

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drawing boundaries between ‘humans’ and ‘nonhumans.’”30 The cairns, with their ability to traverse the watershed, passing through urban, suburban, rural, and subterranean spaces alike, draw the viewer’s attention to what Barad described as “materializing effects.” They call into questions which aspects of the landscape are preserved and which parts of history are commemorated. Reoriented through the perspective of the river, the language of westward expansionism is seen in twenty-first-century discussions of racial profiling. In addition, the cairns can activate productive discussions about the divided nature of the St. Louis region that are not entirely centered on race. An understanding of the intersectional nature of inequality in the metro area is potentially channeled through the fragile, transparent forms of the glass cairns. Watershed Cairns addresses ecological crisis through the language of liminality and otherness. By understanding the aesthetics of the project, its insistence on the primacy of objects, as well as the interplay between original site, gallery, and virtual space, we can understand how this work may push border thinking further than Mignolo’s original intentions, expanding it beyond the framework of the human. At the same time, Watershed Cairns softens the object-oriented rigidity of new materialism, grounding it in a physically and socially charged site. These fragile glass objects speak to the precariousness of existence in the current ecological crisis, but they also mark a new way forward.

Bear 71 In her essay “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Karen Barad introduces “queer critters,” entities that make the point that “their very ‘species being,’ as it were, makes explicit the queering of identity and relationality. …to speak of ‘queer critters’ is to cut across the cuts that define these terms….”31 For Barad, as a category, “critter” is “already internally queer, having contrary associations as a term defined both in contrast to or as distinct from humans…and, in relation to humans.”32 Cairns enacts a kind of queering of the watershed and human constructions of the landscape in general. Building on Barad’s formulation of “critters,” we could also move 30  Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Kon & Forskning No 1-2 (2012), 31. 31  Ibid., 33. 32  Ibid. In Barad’s account, the atom itself exhibits a form of queer performativity: the discontinuousness of the quantum leap between energy levels “belying the very notion of a leap” (39).

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toward another, singular “critter,” this time one that forges a deep empathic bond with the human viewer. The eponymous bear of Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 gives viewers a place to consider not only the “agential cut” between human and nonhuman, but the specific points of contact that queer this distinction. The bear is a transitional figure, one that is neither fully human nor fully nonhuman, but is rather constituted, materially and discursively, in terms of relationality. Bear 71, by virtue of operating in a digital space, enables viewers to cross borders between human and nonhuman, virtual and material, similar to those crossed by the bear herself. The interactive documentary, sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada,33 homes in on a single female bear and sheds the illusion that there can exist an unspoiled, untouched “nature.” Over a 20-minute narrative arc, Bear 71 chronicles the life and death of a female grizzly living in Banff National Park. It presents the viewer with the result of this false opposition between nonhuman nature and the human. By crossing over this presupposed boundary, the bear and the (human) viewer expose the material consequences of constructing such Baradian “cuts,” particularly that between an unspoiled, Romantic landscape and the human apparatus that sustains this illusion. In Bear 71, Allison and Mendes place the viewer into the uneasy space between the sublime landscape of the imagination and the virtual, schematic one presented on the screen. Alberta’s Banff National Park appears in promotional images (Fig. 5.5) as a pristine wilderness complete with ice-blue glacial lakes and picturesque mountain ranges. No signs of human presence mar the landscape, and the cloud-topped peaks give a sense of enormous scale. A classic confrontation is set up between the human viewer and this romantically sublime setting. Bear 71’s premise, similar to Maya Lin’s What Is Missing? (Chap. 2), rests on a disjuncture, here between the idea of the untouched landscape and the reality of a circumscribed, surveilled park packaged for human consumption. A national park, after all, is still a park, established for the purposes of preservation, education, and entertainment. Bear 71 exposes the altruistic framework of “preservation” as yet another means to commodify the nonhuman. The documentary footage comes almost entirely from the closed-circuit surveillance cameras placed throughout the so-called wilderness, edited together to provide a general narrative of 33  https://bear71vr.nfb.ca/ (this URL links to the “VR” redesign; there is also an option to view the original experience).

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Fig. 5.5  Banff National Park, stock photo from Alamy

the bear’s life, untimely death, and the aftermath of its passing.34 The choice to use this found footage illustrates the degree of control exercised throughout the landscape and disabuses the viewer of any sense of remoteness. The Bear 71 site underwent a redesign in 2018, changing the layout of the digital landscape from an aerial perspective to one that mimics a virtual reality experience. My analysis here considers both, but privileges the original, which I describe here. After an elaborate introduction, which sets up the conceit of the security footage amid an array of screens, a map rolls out, presenting the interactive environment. Entering into the film, viewers locate themselves within the schematic landscape, with symbols representing the changing terrain and simple color differentials indicating the presence of lakes, grass, and rock. A train periodically runs through the park, both a mild auditory disturbance and a foreshadowing of events to come. The cloud-tipped peaks lose their sublime beauty, reduced to a series of dashes. This landscape is as real as any photograph, for mimetic 34  The network of cameras and sensory equipment is vast, for Banff comprises over 2500 square miles.

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digital representation, such as the image of Banff in Fig. 5.5, is itself mediated through pixels and modified by lines of code. Viewers navigate this digital landscape while the documentary’s narrative plays in the background. They may toggle between the film’s main video feed and the security camera footage showing Banff’s other inhabitants. One is free to search for Bear 71 or to wander and explore the rest of the park as her story continues. Upon encountering a deer, wolf, or other creature, a fact sheet appears on the screen, as well as a short clip of the animal from the security footage. A look at Deer 276 gives information about the individual animal (four years old, 126 kg) and facts pertaining to the larger population it represents (75,000 deer hunted and killed in British Columbia in the late 1960s). The footage of the deer cycles through various locations and seasons, spring foliage follows winter snow. A navigation zone appears in the upper right corner, alerting the viewer at all times to the position of Bear 71. This interactivity resembles a video game, albeit one with no immediate objective. Much like the animal inhabitants of the park, viewers wander the scene, ambling from mountaintop to lake, crossing roads and train tracks. If viewers find themselves disoriented in this pared-down landscape, then Bear 71 has succeeded, for the scenery has been coded into a matrix of symbols, colors, and icons. Light blue signifies water, green slashes indicate mountain meadows, and so forth. By mimicking the aesthetic of a computer program, the schematic landscape keeps viewers attuned to the ever-present systems of control in place, and, ultimately, the biopolitical dynamics at play in the park. With the website’s redesign, Bear 71’s map has a different orientation, one that partially reconciles the gap between digital encoding and mimetic representation. Viewers still navigate a schematic Banff, but the shift in perspective from aerial to embedded first-person serves to reinstate some of the sublimity lost in the original design. As viewers navigate the landscape, they retain a positioning and sense of scale that is decidedly more-­ than-­human, if not quite the omniscient perspective of the overhead. Rather than flatten out the landscape as the earlier version had done, the redesign reinstates some of the mountains’ verticality, the depth of the valleys, and the overall aura that pervades the mimetic representation of Banff. When crossing through water or dense trees, the “human” icon enacts a temporary displacement, encoding human presence into the landscape and enacting that slight reconciliation between mimesis and abstraction. Whether in the 2012 version or this newer version, however, viewers cannot lose themselves within the schematic digital landscape in the same

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way as with the mimetically encoded photograph. The glacial beauty of the Banff vista distracts from the political ecology of the landscape while the schematic reveals those hidden power dynamics. Banff, for all its picturesque vantage points and seeming harmony, is a highly unbalanced landscape. The film illustrates the extent of human intervention, and through it, Allison and Mendes invite viewers to renegotiate their relationship with the environment. The film’s narrative interweaves with viewers’ explorations through digital space. Bear 71 voices her own story, in a performance by the actress Mia Kirshner from a script by JB MacKinnon. The choice to have the bear speak for herself is, to an academic audience, jarring, calling up questions of whether this act constitutes appropriation. It seems unclear as to why this documentary, clearly enmeshed in discourses of human-nonhuman relations and invested in complicating such binary logic, would utilize such a polarizing trope. I find that the jarring nature of the narration marks this choice as a strategic one; viewers are continuously reminded of the film’s artifice. The remote camera footage may give a veneer of objectivity, but the bear’s narration is decidedly subjective. In this manner, she becomes more of a transitional figure—existing in a limbo between the real Bear 71 who once roamed Banff and anthropocentric image of a bear, her double as filtered through a Western cultural lens. It is this imposed narrative that constructs Bear 71 as one of Barad’s “queer critters,” asking viewers to reconsider the binary logic inherent in the human-­ nonhuman divide. In his seminal Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour describes how the “curious exchange of properties” between the human and nonhuman works to compose a collective.35 Within this collective, Latour asks humans to speak on behalf of the nonhuman. He locates the role of “spokesperson” within the realm of science and proposes that “speech is no longer a specifically human property, or at least humans are no longer its sole masters.”36 Latour’s idea of a collective has resonance throughout the eco-art works that I have analyzed in this study. Eco art, at its core, speaks to environmental crises that affect more than just the human inhabitants of the earth 35  Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, (Harvard University Press, 2004) 61. 36  Latour, 65. Rather than the modernist reliance on objectivity and the infallibility of Science, however, Latour warns against presupposing “mute things and speaking facts” (p. 68).

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and voices support for nonhumans. Reading Latour’s “exchange of properties” as more of a blurring of boundaries, we see how such a collective can complicate the subject-object distinction. This idea of the collective finds a foothold in Bear 71, emphasized initially in the layout of the map. The viewer, assigned a number, becomes one “human” among many other actors. Bear 71 and her cubs, along with various numbered lynxes, wolves, grizzlies, and deer, inhabit Banff as mobile icons within a schematic landscape. The viewer enters into this environment as one denizen of the park among many, labeled in the same manner.37 The use of first-person narrative, then, renders Bear 71 slightly more human. If humans roam the landscape, entering the park, then Bear 71 must take on a few human characteristics in turn. This transfer of properties takes place against the schematic backdrop, actively asserting its digitally constructed, artificial character. Virtual worlds encourage this kind of imaginative capacity, or as Barad might suggest, precipitate the queering of the agential cut between human and nonhuman. The audio, consisting of the bear’s narration over an electronic soundtrack, plays in the background, and a menu (labeled “story” in the redesign) breaks up the film into discrete sections.38 Viewers are free to play Bear 71 in order to skip to any given chapter. Some portions of the film open up into a full screen, demanding full attention, while at other times the interactive map returns to the fore. Viewers constantly shift between occupying the digital space, processing the overarching narrative, and confronting the visual material on offer. Bear 71’s symbolic birth opens the piece, focusing on the moment when, at age three, she is tagged, named, and released back into the park. She squeals in fright as park rangers set her free. Her first words of the documentary: “Banff National Park in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. Bears and humans here live closer together than in any other place on Earth.” Subsequent chapters detail the extent of the surveillance network in the park, the bears’ conflicting relationship with tourists in the park, and the difficulty of raising cubs in such 37  When the site was launched, enabling of one’s camera would generate a small video link alongside the identifying icon, transporting each viewer into the matrix of the documentary. This function is no longer active. 38  They are as follows: “My Home Range,” “The First Rule of Survival,” “A Mother Bear Is a Cautious Bear,” “I Call It Rubber Bullets,” “What Looks Random Probably Isn’t,” “A Good Bear Won’t Eat the Children,” “An Accident Is Not the Same as a Mystery,” “Put That in Your Notebook,” “You Can’t Eat Technology,” “The Camera Was a Witness,” and “All It Takes Is One Mistake.”

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proximity to human development. In one chapter, titled “A Good Bear Won’t Eat the Children,” Bear 71 explains how having cubs changed her priorities and further restricted her range. She goes on to recount a moment when she was surprised by humans and felt defensive, but upon realizing they were two small girls, opted to run away instead. This vignette alludes to a trans-species maternal instinct. Another moment in the film illustrates the juxtaposition between audio and visuals. In the chapter titled “I Call It Rubber Bullets,” a visual of an overpass appears in full screen. Bear 71 walks beneath it, lumbering from the background to the foreground and beyond the frame. Immediately, a family, complete with small children bearing pool floats, frolics into the camera, appearing from the very spot where Bear 71 has just left. At this point, the film clearly knits together two completely separate moments, but the implication is of a near miss, what could have happened had the family and the bear overlapped in time as well as space. While the footage plays on screen, Bear 71 opines, “[p]eople come to Banff to see what’s been lost almost everywhere else. Everyone wants to see a grizzly bear. No one wants to be killed by one.” The phrase “No one wants to be killed by one” overlays the footage of the children, happily and unknowingly treading the same ground as the bear. Considering the surveillance apparatus and the omnipresence of the human, the film goes a step further, asking viewers to question who is the border crosser in this scenario, and whether there exists a boundary between human development and “the wild” at all. Set against footage from security cameras and those mounted on an oncoming train, the documentary’s climax comes as Bear 71 describes her own death. The film editing propels the narrative forward, cutting between the train and the bear as the music swells and the train’s-eye-view brings viewers right up to the moment of impact. At this point, the film assumes that viewers have formed a personal connection with either the bear herself or (more accurately) their own particular ideas of a bear. The scene is emotional for its inevitability, as Bear 71’s final moments expose the limits of empathy. Her reaction is purely instinctual, that of a frightened animal. Lingering on the bear’s death and its aftermath, the film complicates the naïve desire for simple coexistence. Speaking about her cub, Bear 107, and the chances of survival on her own, Bear 71 acknowledges that “[m]ore than a million years of evolution have prepared her to live in the wild. But let’s face it, the wild isn’t where she lives.” Assembling the Latourian collective or envisioning Morton’s ecology without nature are deceptively simple tasks, and material concerns can easily undo much of this work. No

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matter how many properties humans and nonhumans exchange, Bear 71 posits, forming a Latourian collective cannot undo the reality of the train charging through Banff. As the film argues, the bear is necessarily constituted through its relation to humans and human intervention. Imposing an anthropocentric narrative upon Bear 71 hints at how her identity is discursively constituted by human folklore, BBC nature documentaries, and the traits of her species alike. What viewers see on the screen as they watch Bear 71 is the uncanny juxtaposition of bear as individual organism, species (Ursus arctos), and bear as cultural construct. By having the bear narrate her own story, Allison and Mendes make those shifting identifications explicit, and the film’s affective potential hinges on the animal’s social and cultural positioning as both cute and maternal. In The Ecological Thought (2010), Morton acknowledges the appeal of the cute, but that “the ecological thought contemplates a sub-aesthetic level of being, beyond the cute and beyond the awesome.”39 Both the cute and the awesome (or the sublime) distance the human from the nonhuman, he argues. Yet cuteness is a complex concept, I contend, and is inseparable from personal and cultural histories. The film upends expectations of the cute through the use of remote camera footage and the insistence on calling Bear 71 by number. This name reflects her proximity to her human observers, a subject of research rather than an anthropomorphized pet. She is, from (symbolic) birth to death, entirely defined by her relationship to humans. Nonetheless, the bear registers close to a universal appeal with the viewing audience. Graham Huggan, in his study of polar bears in British nature documentaries, touches on the symbolism of the bear, which “transcends the actual conditions in which it lives and forages” while “its primary function today is that of an icon of vulnerability in a threatened world.”40 Although his analysis focuses on the precarity of life in the vanishing Arctic landscape, it is evident that the condition of vulnerability maps quite easily on the lives of brown bears in Banff and the Canadian Rockies. Grizzly bears are victims of a shifting climate as well as human intrusion into their habitat. Dwindling food sources lead to starvation and a need to venture 39  Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010) (Location 220 - Kindle edition). 40  Graham Huggan, “Never-ending stories, ending narratives: Polar bears, climate change populism, and the recent history of British nature documentary film,” Affect, Space and Animals, Jopi Nyman and Nora Schuurman, eds. (Routledge, 2015), 14.

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into human habitats to find sustenance. For the British nature documentaries Huggan analyzes, polar bears become a stand-in for the human. In an affective turn, their endangerment parallels that of humanity. In Bear 71, the titular bear succumbs to the train snaking its way through the mountains, not a circumstance that applies broadly to human beings, but nonetheless rendered affective by the bear’s shared human traits. The bear—specifically the form of the teddy bear—is a symbol of affection in Western culture.41 Since the introduction of the toy in 1905, its status has shifted “from that of boyhood mischievousness to early childhood dependency.”42 Huggan notes that the stuffed bear is a “comforting image”43 with universal appeal. A typical stuffed bear is deeply anthropomorphized, with enlarged, forward-facing eyes, a flattened snout, and a stitched-on smile. They are almost always seated, with arms the right length to hug. Teddy bears and their variations frequently serve as transitional objects, allowing the young child to develop a sense of self apart from its parents. Bears recur throughout children’s books, films, and other media: the Berenstain Bears, Winnie the Pooh, Corduroy, the Care Bears, Teddy Ruxpin, Baloo, Paddington Bear, and Yogi Bear, not to mention icons such as Smokey the Bear, that standard-bearer for fire prevention. The bear, whether stuffed or animated, a literary reference or a part of pop culture, is a staple of childhood. In this manner, Bear 71 and her cubs strike an affective chord with the typical viewer, conjuring up thoughts of emotional security and a deep connection with an inanimate object. These 41  For the purposes of this study, I will not delve into the ways that bears factor into indigenous cultures and religions. The film assumes a broad Canadian (and U.S.) audience, one that would not necessarily be familiar with these multifaceted roles for the figure of the bear. Suffice it to say that indigenous viewers, by no means a monolith, would bring different sets of associations to the film. Mark Cheetham deals with the relationship between eco art and indigenous voices in Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the 60s (Penn State Press, 2018). I would also point readers in the direction of Kaarina Kailo’s anthology Wo(men) and Bears: The Gifts of Nature, Culture, and Gender Revisited (Inanna Publications: Toronto, 2008), which draws from Inuit legends and those of other First Nations, as well as Finno-ugric and Armenian sources. The volume considers the interspecies relationship between women and bears as well as the figure of the she-bear, which is by no means universal. 42  Donna Varga and Rhoda Zuk, “Golliwogs and Teddy Bears: Embodied Racism in Children’s Popular Culture” The Journal of Popular Culture (2013). Online: https:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpcu.12042 43  Huggan, 17.

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connections also make the use of the narrative voice in Bear 71 less jarring, for most viewers are accustomed to the trope of the talking bear. Mother bears, such as Bear 71, bring an added cultural and gendered dimension. They are framed in terms of the family unit, risking life and limb to protect their cubs.44 In a 2010 article for the Carl Jung Society of Atlanta, journalist Ariana Huffington noted its resonance with Jung’s idea of the “collective unconscious,” forming an archetype that cuts across cultural lines.45 Hence, humans tend to elevate the mother bear as a devoted figure, an embodiment of sacrifice as well as power. As Huffington notes in her essay, it is no surprise that the Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin identified herself with the moniker “mama grizzly” during the 2008 U.S. Elections and beyond, with such statements as “You thought pit bulls were tough? Well, you don’t wanna mess with the mama grizzlies.”46 While Huffington cautions against a crisis-ridden populace latching onto archetypes as a means to alleviate collective anxieties, it is clear that by channeling the figure  of the mother bear, Palin sought to identify herself with as close to a universal trope as possible. The figure of the mother bear is associated with both nurture and terror. Female grizzlies such as Bear 71 can weigh over 400 pounds. When raised on two legs, they stand approximately ten feet tall, and their claws can make ribbons of fragile human skin. If the teddy bear finds its popular outlet in such cartoon characters as Winnie the Pooh, then the aggressive, wild bears fall more along the lines of the animal in Michael Punke’s The Revenant (2002) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2015 film adaptation. Stories of bear attacks and narrow escapes permeate the collective imaginary, making incidents like the 2005 attack on a father and daughter in Montana’s Glacier National Park particularly evocative, as the survivors are able to recount the exact horror of the incident.47 Bear 71, however, 44  See Virginia Morrell, “Mother brown bears protect cubs with human shields.” Science 6/22/2016. 45  Ariana Huffington, “Sarah Palin, Mama Grizzlies, Carl Jung, and the Power of Archetypes,” Jung Society of Atlanta, Fall 2010, 11. http://69.39.227.160/articles/fall10sarah-palin.pdf. 46  Palin, quoted in Huffington, 11. She quotes here a web video from Palin titled “Mama Grizzlies.” This video was published on July 8, 2010, and can be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF-OsHTLfxM. 47  Thomas Curwen, “A Hike into Horror and an Act of Courage in Glacier National Park,” Los Angeles Times April 29, 2007. https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-trw-attackedbyagrizzly29apr29-story.html. Glacier National Park occupies the same range as Banff.

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takes pains to distinguish the bear and her motivations from those underlying such sensational bear attacks. After justifying her need to remain in the valley, and therefore in proximity to humans, she claims, “I was a good bear. I didn’t knock over anyone’s garbage cans. I didn’t break into anyone’s mobile home.” Bear 71 actively avoided confrontation, choosing to let the two girls in her story leave unscathed. This anecdote tracks with the general advice given for preventing bear attacks, when attunement with the animal, rather than antagonism, becomes the key to survival. Hikers in bear country are encouraged not only to bring bear mace (a supercharged pepper spray), but also to learn the signs of grizzly behavior. Distinguishing between an aggressive or curious bear can mean the difference between life and death on the trail. Video guides encourage hikers to pay close attention to a bear’s demeanor, her ear position, and overall appearance (is she starving? Protective? Unsure?).48 The affective impact of the bear is based upon a shifting series of identifications. Viewers see themselves and perhaps their family units reflected in Bear 71’s motivations, her desire to protect her cubs and to survive in an often-unforgiving environment. She may remind viewers of their earliest childhood experiences, for bears are often one’s first emotional connection with the nonhuman. While viewers may bring their particular experiences to the film, it is important to note that the bear depicted on screen is equally multivalent. She is at once an archetype, a cultural construct, and an individual. As Gwendolyn Blue writes in her study of the film, “Bear 71 is not just an abstract bear. She is situated in her own affective and familial relations in ways that influence her actions.”49 The identifications Bear 71 negotiates traverse all of these levels, never settling on a single frame: the roles she plays within her own family, the cultural and mythological figure of the bear writ large, and the personal associations that she evokes in the film’s viewers. The digital screen mediates these shifting relationships and configures the agential cuts, those that mark identity within itself, at work. Bear 71 eschews the ultra-high-definition, slow-motion action found in iconic BBC documentaries such as Planet Earth (2006) or Frozen Planet (2011). 48  See any number of information videos online. This one from the rangers at Great Smoky Mountains National Park is representative: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qZ9GzIMGRMw 49  Gwendolyn Blue, “Public Attunement with More-than-Human Others: Witnessing the Life and Death of Bear 71” GeoHumanities 2:1 (May 2016), 50.

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It also avoids the visual tropes of less objective films such as Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). Herzog reveled in the late Timothy Treadwell’s footage of Kodiak bears as they played against the backdrop of an Alaskan wilderness. All of these films—the BBC documentaries and Herzog’s meditation alike—immerse the viewer in the landscape and situate its characters within sublime surroundings. They capture the drama of survival in an unforgiving world, the dance of predator and prey, or the individual’s stand against the elements. The aesthetic of Bear 71 is diametrically opposed to this. All of the footage of Bear 71 and the park’s other inhabitants is taken from a network of remote cameras that together provide a visual testament to Banff’s surveillance apparatus. Most of it is grayscale, shot at night or in low light. Because of the static camera position, shots are not composed with any aesthetic sensibility. Rather, the animals enter and exit the frames, moving with seeming randomness through the forest. The color footage that is used comprises the narrative portion of the film and is similarly grainy. Blue has also written on this aspect of the film, noting that Bear 71 mirrors our own circumstances. She notes that “we are all, potentially, public in ways that we might not anticipate as technologies such as closed-circuit television, Global Positioning System (GPS), satellite images, and radio frequency identification tags…track, record, and monitor mundane activities.”50 This connection to the viewer’s own circumstance, facilitated through the transparency of the digital, is another of Bear 71’s shifting and multivalent identifications. Being “potentially public,” as Blue writes, is what Margaret Kohn alludes to in a 2010 essay on surveillance. For her, closed-circuit footage complicates the domains of public and private, or what she terms the “front stage” and “back stage” interactions. Hidden camera technology “undermines this important distinction…if every interaction may be observed by unknown others, then every interaction must follow ‘front stage’ conventions, which are more rigid and demanding.”51 By working entirely from Banff’s network of surveillance footage, Allison and Mendes make yet another affective demand upon the viewer. If our own experience with hidden camera surveillance actively changes our behavior, the “front-stage” conventions Kohn describes, then the visuals of Bear 71  Blue, 52.  Margaret Kohn, “Unblinking: Citizens and Subjects in the Age of Video Surveillance,” Constellations 17 (4): 582. 50 51

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both establish viewers as omniscient observers and subjects them to the control of a much larger system. Witnessing the remote camera footage of park animals has the potential to trigger viewers’ own recognition. The aesthetic of the remote cameras (grainy footage, poor composition, animals moving off frame) may bring to mind similar experiences of seeing themselves captured by the unblinking eye of a surveillance apparatus. This mode of representation may generate an affective response that serves to (temporarily) displace the viewing subject. The remote cameras also give the illusion of a lack of human control. Although the narrative is constructed and edited by humans, the visuals themselves are the product of happenstance. Bear 71 presents viewers with a machine eye, detached from that of the (human) cinematographer. In these surveillance cameras, the oculus clicks on when triggered, and off when the frame ceases to register significant motion. This mechanism does not distinguish between different levels of interest—a bear and a mouse both elicit the same effect. These cameras are also what give Bear 71 its non-linear vignettes, the supporting images that accompany each lynx or deer and can be summoned at any time. In combination with research footage, they also comprise part of the film’s driving narrative. Viewers encounter Bear 71 through these varying aesthetic registers: first, the abstracted, interactive map, and afterward the footage from the network of remote cameras. What was initially envisioned as an open, vast landscape is now a media-scape, closed off, circumscribed, and under the centralized control of a surveillance system. The viewer is free to inhabit it, to an extent, and perhaps approach it like a game. For Bear 71, however, what appears to be a game is for her a matter of life and death. Throughout the documentary, Bear 71 occupies multiple registers: of bears both real and imagined, anthropomorphic and rigorously nonhuman. In doing so, she crosses metaphysical boundaries and shifting digital territory. However, within her narrative the bear also stays in her lane, moving purposefully throughout the park, but never straying outside her valley. Instead, humans and their technologies cross into and out of her space. The train, conceived here as both the aural disturbance on the map and the mechanism of Bear 71’s death, draws and redraws a different border, that between the encroaching human world and the bear’s domain. In the film, humans are the ultimate border crossers. Viewers of the website cross the virtual/material divide, park visitors in Banff leave their vehicles for an encounter with the sublime, and the train’s conductor drives through the boundary between life and death. Each of these

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examples draws attention to the borders being crossed and to the ways each border is established and is destabilized. Such boundaries are arbitrary, commercial, ontological, and metaphysical, an integral part of how they are navigated in turn. Bear 71, the other denizens of the park, human tourists, and the film’s online viewers make up a panoply of Baradian “queer critters,” the existence of which openly questions the very categories of human and nonhuman altogether. Bear 71 is an exhortation for viewers to reconsider the value they place on such borders—those that define a separate natural world and the entire concept of “the wild.”

Borders Crossers as Disobedient Objects Like the cairns in Reuter’s and Rowan’s series, Bear 71 is herself an object that defies easy categorization. Each of these examples can be described as “disobedient objects,” a term I borrow from the catalogue for the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2014 exhibition Disobedient Objects (2014). According to its curators Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, aesthetic political objects “may be simple in means, but rich in ends… they tend to foreground promiscuous resourcefulness, ingenuity, and timely intervention.”52 In other words, they are imbued with the kind of agency for which new materialism argues. These qualities are evident in Reuter and Rowan’s glass cairns and in the footage of Bear 71. Though some of these descriptors—ingenuity, resourcefulness—are not easily anthropomorphized, they are qualities that can be inherent to nonhumans. Within the logic of Watershed Cairns, the glass objects captured in the photographs are a timely intervention into the material fabric of the St. Louis region and the Mississippi watershed. They disrupt the notion of boundaries in a city rife with division. Bear 71, eking out a living on the periphery of human development, is resourceful, up until the point when her instincts fail. Together, their disobedience results in the crossing of borders, and in some cases, their dissolution altogether. In addition to the immediate eco-political aims of Watershed Cairns and Bear 71, the border crossers (cairns, bear, and viewers) I have discussed in this chapter open up alternate ways for thinking about the intersections between eco art, identity politics, and the broader aims of climate justice. They illustrate the overlaps that are necessary for building a border 52  Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, “Introduction,” in Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, eds, Disobedient Objects, V&A Publishing, London, 2014, p 12.

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ecology, with its diverse perspectives comprising humans, nonhumans, and the intersections that enliven each category. The language of liminality and otherness that they engage dovetails with the motion of the objects they present and undermines the apparent solidity of established borders. As transgressive figures, they enable multiple discourses to coalesce within the broader field of eco art. In light of these intersections, each of the works I have analyzed in this chapter confronts viewers with a conundrum about objecthood. For example, consider the complicated status of the cairns in the gallery space. These are uneasily housed in glass vitrines, on a break from their extensive journeys along the watershed. While their very presence in the gallery without a trace of their ingenuity or resourcefulness stymies discussions of their animacy, it is necessary to remind viewers that they are objects. Having been to the far reaches of the watershed, the cavernous space of the underground sewer, riding the floodwaters, and sitting quietly in the pond, the cairns are mute witnesses to all they have experienced. Their exhibition in the gallery poses a challenge to the viewers as to how to access this hidden knowledge possessed and disseminated by a withdrawn object. Bear 71, as portrayed in Bear 71, with her anthropomorphisms and imagined narrative voice, taps into the discomforting rhetoric of human-­ as-­animal: the labeling of undocumented migrants as inhuman or animal. Contemporary political rhetoric urges the construction of walls and the enactment of travel bans to keep out the “other,” seeking definitive boundaries and shoring up the old binaries. Medieval European cartographers populated the margins of their maps with the monstrous, the divine, and the not-quite-human. Sciapods and sea monsters alike were always swarming at the edges, portending terror and intrigue. Bear 71 lingers on the margins of the human environment, taking on behaviors and characteristics of the human in order to survive. She emerges throughout the documentary as a figure both endearing and terrifying, a symbol of maternal strength and a potential threat. Bear 71 reminds viewers that the term “animal” is one that cannot be thrown around lightly and that such a label has rhetorical and material repercussions. Bear 71 and the cairns are still nonhumans crossing borders, but through their perpetually shifting identifications with the human, they are able to transcend a reliance on the binary.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusions and New Directions: Border Art for a Border Ecology

The previous chapter concluded with the potential of transgressive, border crossing objects to challenge the rhetorical strategies of the far Right. In doing so, such objects, the cairns and Bear 71, re-encode the gaps and the liminal spaces of the map, populating them not with monsters, but with enchanted, evocative human-nonhuman entanglements. Such a shift is, I argue, precisely why it is productive to construct ecological crisis in terms of a border ecology, drawing attention to the margins and engaging in radical ontological realignments. Identifying viewers with the nonhuman, allowing new alliances to form, and ultimately speaking along with, but not for the nonhuman, are just some of the potential political provocations this way of thinking enables. The artists I have engaged are, to varying degrees, acutely aware of the need for such a repositioning and of the generative potential of the borders, wherever they may lie. The “border” in border ecology, then, is a deceptive term. Although it implies division, the term instead seeks to reconfigure them and to analyze the processes by which such classifications are made. Figure 6.1 presents an aerial view of an installation that straddles the border between the United States and Mexico, Postcommodity’s 2015 Repellent Fence. This image is a provocative one: a line of yellow helium balloons, each 10 feet in diameter and tethered 100 feet above ground, cuts diagonally across the foreground, receding into a mountainous horizon. The balloons appear to hold their ground, marking a swath of territory for a new order, one indicated by the inscrutable symbols emblazoned © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. N. Sheren, Border Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1_6

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Fig. 6.1  Postcommodity, Repellent Fence installation view

in all directions. At once an eye and a target, the balloons themselves, the artists write, are enlarged versions of an ineffective “scare-eye” bird repellent, but “[c]oincidently…use indigenous medicine colors and iconography—the same graphic used by indigenous peoples from South America to Canada for thousands of years.”1 This Repellent Fence intersects another one, as the photograph shows the long line of yellow balloons straddling the U.S.-Mexico border. At center left, the dark line of the border fence emerges briefly before ducking back behind a swell of the ground. From this vantage point, the balloon fence overpowers the international border line. The bright yellow orbs supersede the authority of the wall. Unlike the border fence, the Repellent Fence is inherently open, for there is no barrier in the intervals between each tether. The use of balloons also sets the line in motion, for each can sway depending on the direction and intensity of the wind. Aesthetically, these two factors construct a border line that is both porous and vacillating, terms used by Etienne 1   Postcommodity, “Repellent Fence  – 2015.” Online. http://postcommodity.com/ Repellent_Fence_English.html.

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Balibar, among others, to describe the state of international divides in late twentieth-­century Europe.2 The promise of a globalized world, one heralded by such efforts as the Schengen Agreement, the establishment of the Eurozone, and in North America, 1994s NAFTA, was one of openness and access, signified by the rhetoric of the dissolution (or at least the permeability) of longstanding borders. It is no coincidence, then, that Repellent Fence offers up a line that fulfills these very conditions, intersecting with and undermining the stability of the metal fence that lurks in the background. Postcommodity staged this hybrid land/border art installation between the cities of Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora. These two sister cities become stitched together through a fence made not of solid metal, but of air, a play on the popular conception of the border as an empty space or “no-man’s land.” Such rhetoric imagines the borderlands as previously unoccupied, a tabula rasa for U.S. settler colonialism under the guise of Manifest Destiny. If Watershed Cairns complicated the popular conception of the Mississippi River as the dividing line between “civilization” and “frontier,” then Repellent Fence does similar work to undo the normalization of the border as line dividing unclaimed territories. Douglas, Arizona, is home to the “Geronimo Surrenders” monument, a marker of the ongoing colonial project in the U.S.  Southwest. Such a monument inscribes the history of the region in terms of Anglo-American victories, rather than the dispossession of indigenous peoples.3 Visual culture theorist Matthew Irwin writes that the Repellent Fence “shifts from a politics of knowledge based on observed objects or people to an evaluation of the conditions and structures of coloniality, while prompting local people to activate their own networks and decolonial identities” and in doing so “re-­ conceived of the border as temporarily disrupted Indigenous space.”4 As a scholar of the borderlands, I am immediately drawn into a comparison with The Cloud, Alfredo Jaar’s performance/installation for the 2000–01 version of the San Diego-Tijuana festival InSITE.  A cloud  Balibar, 217.  Two of Postcommodity’s members, Kade Twist and Raven Chacón, identify as Navajo and Cherokee, respectively. Another member, Cristóbal Martinez, considers himself Chicano. 4  Matthew Irwin, “Suturing the Borderlands: Postcommodity and Indigenous Presence on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture No. 26 (May 2017). Online. https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/suturing-the-borderlands-postcommodity-and-indigenous-presence-on-the-u-s-mexico-border/. 2 3

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comprised of over a thousand helium balloons, labeled with the names of the more than three thousand undocumented immigrants who died making the desert crossing, was tethered to the ground at Valle de los Muertos (or, Valley of the Dead).5 During the performance the cloud was opened, and the balloons were carried south on the wind. The direction was unintended, but it allowed for the symbolism of a return journey home. I have discussed this piece at length in previous work,6 so I will instead focus on its resonances with Postcommodity’s Repellent Fence. The two pieces are formally similar, hinging on the installation of balloons at the specific site of the border. Each comprises a spectacle, using its platform to advocate for those rendered invisible by the rhetoric surrounding the border. Yet Postcommodity’s work more closely aligns with my idea of a border ecology, drawing attention to human voices in ways that prioritize objecthood and foreground discussions of the environment. I would argue that Repellent Fence is border art for a border ecology, moving the genre away from its earlier focus on identity politics and toward more nuanced and constantly shifting identifications. Such erased histories bring the viewer back to the symbols emblazoned on the bright yellow balloons. Those “scare-eye” targets are intended for home use, imitating the glaring eyes of predatory birds. A quick Amazon search for the product brings up images of the “scare eyes” hanging in gardens and, in one crudely Photoshopped image, poking out of a cornfield next to a denim-clad Anglo-American farmer. The idea of a “repellent fence,” then, raises questions as to who, or what, is being repelled. As such, the work is propositional in nature, perhaps instituting a novel form of border enforcement. The decades-long militarization of the border finds its resolution, even its logical extreme, in the decoy eyes protecting this stretch of land. Yet Postcommodity, in descriptions of the work, refers to the bird repellent as “ineffective.” This assessment is the opinion of one of the artists, who had apparently purchased the product for personal use, only to see the birds return after a few days.7 In its appropriation of the 5  Not all of the undocumented had been identified, so many of the balloons were imprinted with “sin nombre,” an acknowledgment of this fact. 6  For an extended analysis of Jaar’s Cloud, InSITE, and the use of spectacle in border performance, see Chapter Three of Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera Since 1984 (University of Texas Press, 2015). 7  Anya Montiel, “Mending the Border: The Indigenous Eye of Postcommodity.” NMAI Magazine, 2017, www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/mending-border-indigenouseye-postcommodity.

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product symbols, then, Repellent Fence offers a critique of the overly militarized U.S.-Mexico border apparatus. Postcommodity’s intervention reveals the theatrical nature of border security to be pure artifice, a show of force rather than an indication of true strength. Delving further into the “scare-eye” symbolism, the collective notes that the commercially available product makes use of indigenous medicinal colors and appropriates the form of the oblong “eye,” a symbol shared throughout North and South American indigenous communities. Rather than homing in on a specific region, culture or tribe, Postcommodity describes the balloons as an “indigenous semiotic system” that emphasizes “interconnectedness.”8 Taking into account this more complete history of the “scare eye,” it becomes impossible to separate the Western from the non-Western, the United States from Mexico, and the human from the nonhuman. Birds, indigenous medicine, and repellent balloons all meet at the border fence, while migrants, border patrol officers, and border dwellers alike find varying representation in its deceptively simple symbolism. That interconnectedness emphasized by the artists undergirds not only the political activism inherent to the border discourse but also the modern environmental movement. In this vein, it helps to consider that Repellent Fence is a work of Land Art as well as a border installation. Remove the border fence, and this work evokes comparisons to the canonical desert earthworks, Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field, or the linearity of Heizer’s Double Negative, discussed in Chap. 2. In one sense, then, the Repellent Fence returns this study to where it began, with Land  Art’s obsession with scale and its invocation of a Romantic sublime. But such a reading privileges formal qualities at the expense of local knowledge of the land beneath those yellow helium balloons, enacting yet another erasure of indigenous histories. If the border is simply a line drawn on the map, however, a political distinction that has grown to encompass an increasingly militarized security apparatus, this places it within a purely anthropocentric framework. Such an argument voids the notion of border-as-habitat, in some areas a watershed, an estuary at its ends, with large swaths of desert in between. A “big, beautiful” border wall not only separates longstanding human communities, but divides ecological niches. “Border,” then, is yet another touchpoint of entanglement— both discursively and materially constituted, with clear parallels to the polluted divine Yamuna in Galhotra’s Manthan. Repellent Fence encourages 8

 Ibid.

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discussions of the borderlands as a shared space for human and nonhuman interests. Through its appropriation of the bird repellent product, itself an appropriation of indigenous symbols, the installation creates a space for that panoply of human, animal, and object-oriented interests that all vie for recognition at this highly charged site. While Postcommodity’s intervention serves as a prime example of this theory, I wish to consider briefly the work of two borderlands photographers as also constitutive of a border ecology. Daniel Leivick’s 2011 portfolio of panoramas at the Ajo Transect, located south of Phoenix, Arizona, and adjacent to the Tohono O’Odham Nation Reservation, presents an intriguing pairing with the Repellent Fence.9 One photograph, Border Patrol and Cave Dwellings, de-centers the eponymous government agents, locating them within a vast and ancient landscape. A single road transects a desert valley, receding into the distance and engulfed by its surroundings. Hills flank each side of the composition, and a distant mountain range can be seen in the background. Human presence cannot be easily identified, other than the clues given in the title. The equal weighting of the border patrol with the cave dwellings serves to remind the viewer that human presence in this desert landscape takes multiple forms, that, as with the Repellent Fence, there is no single position of privilege from which to operate. Susan Harbage Page operates in a manner that diverges from Leivick’s grand panoramas, but her attention to intersections of human and nonhuman at the border helps to broaden this concept of border art for a border ecology.10 In two related series, Harbage Page photographs personal objects—a comb, an eyeshadow compact, a twisted gray sweatshirt—discarded by border crossers. For Objects in the Landscape (2007–present), the objects located in situ offer up these belongings as evidence of their owners’ presence, testaments to the arduous nature of the journey, and evidence of shared humanity. More intriguing, however, is the second life of these objects, for Harbage Page removes them from their site, brings them to her North Carolina studio, and documents them as part of her contemporaneous series Anti-archive. Devoid of context, in Anti-archive Object No. 15 (2008), a toothbrush lies on a pink background under studio lighting, the grime caking its fabric seemingly incongruous in the  Leivick’s portfolio can be accessed at https://danielleivick.com/portfolios/ajo-transect.  Harbage Page’s series Objects in the Landscape and the Anti-Archive can be accessed at https://susanharbagepage.com/u-s-mexico-border-project/. 9

10

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Fig. 6.2  Susan Harbage Page, Anti-archive Object No. 15 (2008). Digital photograph

setting (Fig. 6.2). Each object brims with an inner life and narrative of its own. In the move from site to “non-site” (to paraphrase Smithson), these objects become absorbed into the U.S. interior, completing the border crossing that their owners may or may not have been able to finish. The series plays on the shifting identifications of these objects as belongings, trash, and art object, and their status is never fully settled. The potential of this kind of work, as well as Postcommodity’s more spectacular installation, is to bring these kinds of ecological and nonhuman considerations to the political urgency of the border. The allusion to the bird repellent, the dialogue with the formal aspects of Land Art, and the insistence upon the significance of indigenous presence in the borderlands all work to create a portrait of the border as a site in which every position is marginal, with no single viewpoint privileged above the others. Bisecting the line, the Repellent Fence works to de-hierarchize a deeply overdetermined and securitized space. Such an intervention hints at the political potential of border art within a border ecology. Postcommodity’s installation, as should be clear, ties in neatly with my idea of a border ecology while serving as a launch site for new lines of thought. I find it folding back into one of the questions that propelled this study, that of the boundary-drawing mechanisms of What Is Missing? The

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questions left unanswered in Lin’s map, the excavation of the gaps and liminal spaces, drew my thinking toward questions of representation. Specters of monstrous development in the work of Yao Lu, Jiang Pengyi, and Mitra Azar allowed for temporal shifts beyond that of human perception. With Nixon’s slow violence as a framework, Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World asked us to consider the human in terms of objects. While incorporating local knowledges risks essentializing the Global South, I argued that such a reorientation opened up approaches to ecological crisis that could not be accessed otherwise. In Galhotra’s Manthan, I see a fully entangled approach to the subject of contamination, one that acknowledges that pollution is both a material condition and a discursively produced problem and must be addressed as such. Finally, I offered the figure of the border crosser in Watershed Cairns and Bear 71—inanimate and animate—to call into question the very processes by which we draw and recognize boundaries, in particular those between humans and nonhumans. So much of high-profile eco art hinges on visualizing the scale of the insurmountable problems of environmental crisis. Chris Jordan’s viral digital manipulations, such as his Running the Numbers series (2006–present) point to the immense scale of waste. Fabrice Monteiro’s The Prophecy series (2013–present), set initially in Senegal, has attracted international attention for its depiction of fantastical and vindictive djnns towering over irrevocably polluted landscapes. Such an invocation of divine retribution is terrifying, and, ultimately, paralyzing. Joana Moll’s Deforest, with which I opened this study, represents with those repeating digital trees the creeping horror of very large numbers and forces beyond the power of the individual. Tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have woven themselves into the very fabric of twenty-first-century existence. Extricating oneself from their tentacular reach is, by any reasonable metric, impossible. Such a vision of ecological crisis, however, need not be bleak. What artworks like Deforest can accomplish is not individual change—after all, one person’s Google searches will not tangibly affect the total—but rather a profound ontological realignment. By comprising and envisioning what I have termed a border ecology, eco art as a genre can succeed at placing viewers within that larger matrix of human, nonhuman, and institutional actors. De-prioritizing the human while heeding the longstanding effects of social, cultural, and economic inequality is a delicate balancing act, one that requires the assistance of nonhumans and, I have argued, the knowledge gleaned at the borders.

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Index1

A Abramson, Daniel, 52, 57 “The Abundance of Bison” (Lin), 52, 52n30 Accessibility and chronological time lines, 52 digital art, 3 drones, 98, 99 and technology, 64 After Nature (Purdy), 46 Agamben, Giorgio, 14n26 Agential cuts, 24, 143, 170, 174, 179 Agential realism, 21, 22, 116 Ahmed, Nabil, 17, 18 Alien Phenomenology (Bogost), 7, 82 Alley, Kelley D., 126, 127, 127n33, 129 Allison, Leanne, 170, 173, 176, 180 See also Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes) Allora, Jennifer, 6, 10, 11 Alloway, Laurence, 62

Alÿs, Francis, 31 Ambience Bauxite Pool, 99, 101–103 characteristics, 99 the drone aesthetic, 98–105 screensavers, 73, 74 Watershed Cairns, 39, 40, 148, 150–155, 157, 158, 160n18, 161, 163, 167–169, 182, 192 What is Missing?, 85 Andrejevic, Mark, 105 Animal’s People (Sinha), 87, 88 Animism, 20, 20n45 The Anthropocene dating the beginnings of, 19n44 and European colonialism, 94 “Great Acceleration,” 51, 51n29 human-altered landscape, 112 violence of, 20, 112 water-related issues, 108 See also Colonialism; Environmental crisis; Slow violence

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. N. Sheren, Border Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25953-1

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INDEX

Anthropocentrism, 31 See also Human-nonhuman/ human-nature binaries Anthropomorphism, 147, 183 Anti-archive series (Harbage Page), 190, 190n10 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 30 Archives, 38, 42, 68–74, 83 Arctic Circle Double Travel (Huber and Pocock), 155 Art objects as art history focus, 9 as frame for reality, 12 Harman’s perspective, 29 inner life, 9, 191 multiple relationships associated with, 10, 12 new materialist approaches, 8 objects vs., 8–10, 191 political meanings, 10 translation and metaphor, 8 “treachery” of, 11 viewer experience, 12 See also Eco art; New materialism; Objects Art PLUS_SPI Objects (Harman), 8 The atom, queer performativity, 169n32 Audience, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10–12, 16, 29, 37, 39, 42, 43, 48–51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 61, 63–65, 69, 72–75, 78, 79, 83, 85, 88–90, 92–95, 97, 99–106, 108, 109, 112–114, 117, 127–136, 138–141, 143–145, 148–150, 153–157, 159, 160, 162, 166–183, 174n37, 177n41, 185, 188, 190, 192 Bear 71, 173, 176, 177n41 experience of art objects, 12 imposition of narratives by, 113 An Inconvenient Truth, 24

Manthan, 123n24 privileging, 129, 136 Raptor’s Rapture, 6, 12 The Scene of Crime, 138 and the toxic sublime, 132 virtual connectivity, 154 Audio, see Sound Azar, Mitra, 35, 38, 89, 98–105, 109, 112, 114, 131n46, 138, 192 Bauxite Pool, 98, 99, 101–103 depictions of “slow violence,” 89, 99 documentary photography genre, 38 and the drone aesthetic, 98–105 See also Ambience; Raouché & Dalieh (Azar); Scars & Borders series (Azar) B Balibar, Etienne, 186 Banerjee, Abhijit V., 78 Banerjee, Subhankar, 11, 86, 87 Banff National Park, Alberta, 39, 170, 174 See also Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes) Barad, Karen, 5, 21–24, 33, 39, 116, 120, 123, 125, 143, 144, 168, 169, 169n32, 173, 174 agential realism, 21, 22, 116 diffraction theory, 5, 39 entanglement concept, 125 human-nonhuman binary, 168 on intra-action, as boundary-making practice, 143 on materializing effects, 24, 143, 168 “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 169 queer critters, 169, 173, 182

 INDEX 

Barrada, Yto, 15, 15n27 Bartholl, Aram, 155 Bauxite mining, 100, 100n30 See also Scars & Borders series (Azar) Bauxite Pool (Azar), 98, 99, 101–103 Bear, 21, 39, 178 as cultural construct, 176 mother bears, 21, 39, 178 stuffed, 177 symbolism and appeal of, 176 as transitional figure, 170, 173 Bear 71 affective cord, 179 as both archetype and individual, 179 definition of through humans, 176 as a disobedient object, 182 human-constituted identity, 170 Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes), 21, 39, 178 aesthetic of, 180, 181 audio, 174 border crossings by humans, 39, 148, 182–183 description, 169–173 destruction of the humannonhuman binary, 173 destruction of the myth of wildness, 170 eco-political aims, 182 encoding human presence on the digital landscape, 172 genre-bending in, 35 juxtapositions depicted, 175 questions raised by, 176 surveillance camera visuals, 180 website design/redesign, 172 Beijing, China, 96 Beirut, Lebanon, 102, 104 Belief systems, representing, 25 Bennett, Jane idea of enchantment, 149

209

trans- or inter-species morphing, 149 Vibrant Matter, 13, 15, 110 vital materialism, 13, 15, 20, 21, 110, 150, 154 See also Enchantment; Vital materialism Berlo, Janet Catherine, 20, 20n45 Bhagavata Purana, 120 Bhopal, India, disaster, 87 Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India, extractive industries, 138 See also The Scene of Crime (Kanwar) Bihar, India, floods, 106, 107, 113 Biosphere Soundscapes Project, 49 Bishop, Claire, 76 Blaagaard, Bolette B., 104, 105 Blue, Gwendolyn, 179, 180 Boetzkes, Amanda, 30, 33, 34 Bogost, Ian, 7, 10, 82 Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, 148 Border ecology agential realism and, 116 characteristics, 5 inside vs. outside voices in eco-art, 137 Kanwar’s portrayal of, 143 making the overlooked visible, 4 meaning of term, 24, 25, 38 and modes of thinking about objects, 25 and multiple entanglements, 144 and multiple established/ destabilized borders, 182, 183 perspectives generated from, 117 and political change, 11 and the porous, vacillating Repellent Fence installation, 186 questions raised by Bear 71, 40, 192 reframing the impacts of eco art, 115 rethinking power relations, 27

210 

INDEX

Border ecology (cont.) role of the digital in, 3 and structural inequality, 18, 153, 161 as tool for addressing environmental crisis, 3 watersheds, 39, 91, 147, 148, 152–154, 156, 158–161, 164, 168, 169, 183 wetland loss, 160 What is Missing? as, 29, 32, 34, 38, 38n87, 40–43, 48–54, 58, 59, 63, 64, 67–76, 78–83, 85, 91n14, 137, 140, 170, 191 Border Patrol and Cave Dwellings (Leivick), 190 Borders/boundaries as arbitrary, 182 (see also Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes)) artistic, Smithson’s challenges to, 157 border crossing, 147, 154, 158, 166, 185, 191 boundary objects, 29, 38, 42 characteristics, 164 collapsing of, in eco-art, 21 crossing, value of, 25, 147–149, 154, 158, 164, 166, 170, 182, 183, 185, 191 and the decolonization of nature, 34 dynamic relationality, 22 ecotones, 25, 31 as empty space, 187 as indigenous spaces, 187 landscape as depicting, 79, 105, 134, 192 and maps in digital art, 155 materializing effects, 24, 143, 168, 169 meaning of term, 26, 158 reconceptualizing, 28 as site of” “knowing,” 28 between virtual and material, 1, 3, 148, 170

Border thinking characteristics, 14 in Forest of Bliss as, 129, 130 Galhotra’s art as, 135 including the nonhuman, 29 in Manthan, 130, 135 Mignolo’s theory, 26, 27, 129, 148, 153 and new knowledge, 26 new materialist lens, 150 and rethinking power relations, 27 as transformative, 27 in Watershed Cairns, 153, 154, 192 See also New materialism; Objects, object oriented ontology (OOO) Brand, Stewart, 64, 66, 67, 67n71, 73 Breese, Samuel Finley, 43, 107 Brower, David, 45 Buell, Lawrence, 45 Bunting, Heath, 154 Burke, Edmund, 134 Burtynsky, Edward, 11, 131–134, 137 See also The “toxic sublime” C Cage, John, 6 Cairns as border crossers, 40, 159, 168, 182 complex relationships with humans, 158, 164 as disobedient and unruly, 164, 182 symbolism of glass, 164 See also Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan) Calzadilla, Guillermo, 6, 10, 11 See also Raptor’s Rapture (Allora and Calzadilla) Carbon 14: Climate is Culture (Switzer), 71

 INDEX 

Carbon footprint, the Internet, 1, 4 Carson, Rachel, 13, 25, 45, 51, 61, 83 Chacón, Raven, 187n3 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 17, 18, 21, 23, 92, 93 Cheetham, Mark, 30–32, 34, 59, 61, 119, 177n41 Chin, Mel, 31 China land rights in, 97 in What is Missing?, 85 Chinta and Samundri Davi, Salempur Village near Muzaffarpur (Mendel), 106 Chopra, Radhika, 129, 130 City (Heizer), 63 Civil Rights Memorial (Lin), 52 Clark, Kenneth, 31 Clicktivism/slacktivism, 38, 78 “Climate Change” icon (What is Missing? Lin), 80 Climate crisis, see Environmental crisis Climate migrants, refugees bare life of, 14n26 and The Cloud, 187 decolonizing framework for, 87 dislocation, 86 experience of “slow violence,” 88 representations as nonhuman others, 86, 183, 189 victimization, 89 The Cloud (Jaar), 187 CO2GLE (Moll), 4, 5 Cohen, Brianne, 111 Collective, Latour’s concept, 173 Colonialism appropriation of land by humans, 94 art objects responding to, 10–11 and dehumanization, 16–17 development and global inequality, 97 link with environmental change, 19

211

and manifest destiny, 187 as slow violence, in Kanwar’s visuals, 140 slow violence of, 94 See also Anthropocentrism; Decolonial thought/activism; Land development Colonization, 19, 94 Commodification/privatization of people and resources, 43, 47, 168 Connectedness digital, illusion of seamlessness of, 37 and dominance of some connections over others, 35 Mendel’s dependence on for meaning, 115 Coquí (frog), population decline, 81 From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Turner), 64 Couple Praying (Rabehi), 136 #Crazyweather (Switzer), 71–74 Crochet Coral Reef (M. and C. Wertheim), 16 Crowdfunding, 78, 79 Cubitt, Sean, 54 Cybernetics, 58 Cybernetics (Weiner), 66 D Dalieh, Lebanon, 102, 103 Dastur, Sherna, 139 Databases/archives and 1990s-era art, 27, 42, 68 ambiguity of, 68 Anti-archive series (Harbage Page), 190 as both random and purposeful, 70 File Room (Muntadas), 68–70, 72 See also Archives DDT, scale of effects, 61

212 

INDEX

Decolonial thought/activism combining with border ecology, 5 Demos’s framework, 87 locus of enunciation, 26n59 See also Colonialism Decolonizing Nature (Demos), 86 Deforest (DEFOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOREST) (Moll), 1n1, 2–5, 3n6, 36n81, 37, 40, 75, 192 Deitsch, Dina, 41 de Maria, Walter, 63, 189 Dematerialized media, 35 Demos, T.J., 14n26, 15n27, 19, 30, 34, 86, 87, 89 Destabilization in Azar’s work, 104 of borders, 182 of cultural assumptions, 24n55 of temporality, 104 turn to things, 16 See also Borders/boundaries; Border ecology Development, as a term, 96 Didenko, Tatjana, 155 Die Gläserne Kette (The Crystal Chain) group, 167 Diffraction, 5, 21–24, 33, 39 Digital activism characteristics, 3, 74–75 clicktivism/slacktivism, 38, 78 microfinancing/microcredit, 78, 79 Digital art, 3, 35, 36, 36n81, 40, 48, 90 Digital media accessibility, 36 (see also Eco art) for addressing climate crisis, 3 contrarian practices, 36 as gray/evil, 36, 37 as transformative, 36 and the Vietnam War, 54–55 Dion, Mark, 3, 36n81

Disobedient objects, 182–183 Documentary photography/film, 34 See also Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes); Manthan (Galhotra) Donald, Dwayne, 20, 21 Double Negative (Heizer), 32, 60, 61 Drones and accessibility, 99 and ambience, 98–105, 112 disconnectedness associated with, 104 drone aesthetic, 98–105 and enhanced visibility, 99 and the pairing of human and non-human, 105 and themes associated with visibility, 99 Drowning World (Mendel) disjunctive imagery in, 140 entangled approach to contamination, 192 “Floodlines” series, 106, 109–111 focus on objects and loss, 110 global perspective, 105 impetus for, 106 Joseph and Endurance Edem, with their children Godfreedom and Josephine, Igbogene, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, 108 object-centered approach, 39 photo-filmic landscape, 107 scale in, 107, 113 “Submerged Portraits,” 106, 109, 111 use of digital media, 35 viewer assumptions, 108 Dubberly, Hugh, 66 Duchamp, Marcel, 9 Duflo, Esther, 78 “Dymaxion” (Fuller), 59 Dynamic relationality, 22

 INDEX 

E Early Spring on Lake Dongting, 91 “Earthrise” (NASA), 58 Earthworks echoes of in What is Missing?, 42 as eco art, 34 relationship of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to, 64 scale in, 58 Storm King Wavefield as offshoot from, 54 viewing as eco-art, 34 See also “Whole earth” movement East St. Louis (IL), 153–155, 159 Eco art for addressing environmental crisis, 30 as a border genre, 27 as both material and dematerial, 36, 52, 154 and bridging the subject-object divide, 154 and the cairns in Watershed Cairns, 150–151 challenging established boundaries, 157 Cheetham’s expanded concept, 31 collapsing of boundaries between human and nonhuman, 21 connections with decolonial theory, 112 decolonial, 34 defining, 31 and depicting fragility of place, 159 diffraction in, 33 digital, as a border genre, 27 and the dissolving of established borders, 183 and documentary photography, 34 and earthworks, 27, 34 and eco-aesthetics, 106, 111 eco-critical sound art, 49 ecologically responsible design, 59

213

Forest of Bliss (Gardner), 138 horizontal circuits, 89 identity and representation concerns, 137 and the impact of border thinking, 135 importance in climate discourse, 11 including Land Art and earthworks in, 34 inside vs. outside voices in, 137 interpretations, 12 and the intersection of art and science, 11 and Land Art, 31–33 Latourian collective, 173 and the limitations of the “toxic sublime,” 137 and object-oriented philosophies, 43 and political realignment, 133 power of, 27, 33, 34, 89, 137 and the presentation/interpretation of belief, 127 and real-world meaning, 5 Repellent Fence installation, 185 and representations of belief, 127 and series vs. single images, 112 as tool for addressing environmental crisis, 34, 40, 112 as tool for fostering horizontal circuits, 89 tropes essential to, 61 value for addressing climate concerns, 3 value for documenting slow violence, 89 value of border ecology for discussing, 24 Watershed Cairns online site, 161, 192 What is Missing? as complex, 85 See also Border ecology; Border thinking; Environmental crisis; Objects; Photography

214 

INDEX

Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Nisbet), 33 Ecology, defined, 5, 20, 25 Ecotone, 25, 31 Eiffel Tower, 75, 76, 95, 95n20, 112 Elsah, IL, 160, 161 Elsah Flood, June 2013 (Reuter and Rowan), 159, 160 See also Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan) Empathy/compassion (compassio), 18, 166, 175 Enchantment in Barrada’s work, 15 Bennett’s concept, 14, 15 and border crossings, 154 as an elitist idea, 14 glass and, 154 sacred-profane interactivity, 120 and social conscience, 149 as vital materialism, 15 See also Vital materialism The End of Nature (McKibben), 45 Entanglement approaches to contamination, 192 Barad’s concept, 22 border dwelling and, 27 of human and nonhuman, 101 of matter and discourse, 21, 123 of the sacred and profane, 39, 125 Environmental cleanliness, and holiness, 126 Environmental crisis and addressing multiple entanglements, 145 border ecology as tool for addressing, 40 Carbon 14: Climate is Culture (Switzer), 71 characterizing scope of, 24 and climate justice, 17, 18, 25, 29, 182

expanded perspectives, 5, 51 focus on species survival, 17 as fragility, 46, 72, 159, 161 individual responses, 76 inside vs. outside voices in eco-art, 137 larger entanglements associated with, Galhotra’s depictions, 137 neoliberal approaches, 76 overfocus on interconnectedness with humans, 13 population growth, 18n40, 19 and relationships between divergent ecosystems, 44 role of digital art/eco art, 3, 40, 90 and romanticized images of earth and space, 71 scalar and temporal disjunctures, 192 as slow violence, 85–114 and structural inequality, 153, 161 techno-centric solutions, 45, 59 and weather events, 73 See also Climate migrants, refugees; Slow violence Ethics of Earth Art (Boetzkes), 33 Ethnography, 127, 130 See also Forest of Bliss (Gardner) Evil Media (Fuller and Goffrey), 42 Exteriority-within-phenomena, 143 F “Feelings and Fractals: Woolly Ecologies of Transgender Matter” (Vaccaro), 16 File Room (Muntadas), 42, 68–70, 72 Fink, Peter, 166 Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Yu (Yao Lu), 91–93 Flood, Catherine, 182 “Floodlines” series (Mendel), 106, 109–111

 INDEX 

Floods as biblical metaphor, 109 cyclical, as necessary for life, 113 Elsah Flood, June 2013, 159–161 failure to respect borders, 161 Mississippi River, 39, 148, 151–153, 160, 163 symbolism of, 130 See also Drowning World (Mendel); Water, emotional life of; Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan) FLOWer Alley (Reuter and Rowan), 163 FLOWer Sewer series (Reuter and Rowan), 161, 163, 166 Forest of Bliss (Gardner), 127–130, 138 Fountain (Duchamp), 9, 10, 10n17 4’33” (Cage), 6 Fracking, 100 Fried, Michael, 9 Friedrich, Caspar David, 136 The frontier myth, 46, 152 Frozen Planet (BBC), 179 Fuller, Buckminster, 59, 59n45, 66, 67, 167, 168 Fuller, Matthew, 36, 37, 42 G Galhotra, Vibha, 35, 39, 116, 117, 120, 123, 124, 130–138, 145, 189, 192 on the contradiction between belief and reality, 124 on the dissociation of humans from nature, 117 handling of religious symbolism, 130 Manthan, 35, 39, 116, 117, 120, 123, 124, 130–138, 145, 189, 192

215

presentation of larger entanglements associated with pollution, 138 and the “toxic sublime,” 130–138 The Ganges, India, 118 dead bodies in, 124n28 designation as legal living entity, 144 in Forest of Bliss (Gardner), 127, 128 link between religious authority and ongoing pollution, 126–127 Garbage, sensory, in Lao’s photography, 92 Gardner, Robert, 127, 128, 128n37, 128n40 See also Forest of Bliss (Gardner) Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Missouri, 152 Gatlin, Jill, 134, 135 Geography, landscape vs., 60 Glass, inherent Romanticism of, 167–168 See also Cairns; Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan) Global inequality, 18, 34, 87, 97, 113 and the “Global South,” 89, 116 Mendel’s documentation of, 107 victimizing the global poor, 18, 19 Gloria (Allora and Calzadilla), 10 Goffey, Andrew, 36, 37, 42 Gomba, Obari, 18 Google maps, intrinsic biases, 155 Google searches, carbon emissions from, 2 Gore, Al, 13 Graham and Kieran Leith, Toll Bar Village (Mendel), 107 Grierson, John, 11, 12n20 Grindon, Gavin, 182 Grosz, Elizabeth, 60 Guattari, Felix, 44, 45, 67, 149

216 

INDEX

H Haberman, David L., 118, 120n17, 125 Haeckel, Ernst, 25 Halupka, Max, 78 Harbage Page, Susan, 190, 190n10, 191 Harman, Graham, 2, 3, 5–7, 6n10, 9, 10, 15, 25, 29, 34, 36, 37, 82, 115, 116, 140 Art PLUS_SPI Objects, 8 object oriented ontology (OOO), 3, 6–9, 13, 15, 25, 34, 140 rejection of total interconnectedness, 17, 35, 82 on translation as basis for meaning, 10 withdrawn objects/gaps, 6, 34, 36 See also Environmental crisis; New materialism Harvey, David, 97, 97n23 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 6n10 Heizer, Michael, 32, 33, 60, 61, 63, 189 See also Double Negative (Heizer) Henner, Mishka, 155 Herzog, Werner, 180 Hinduism and distinction between material cleanliness and religious purity, 126 and entanglement of material and spiritual practices, 125 impact of pollution on practice of, 117 presentation in Forest of Bliss, 128, 129 and Western audiences, 127–129 See also The Ganges, India; The Yamuna, India Historical record and databases/archives, 68–74

erasure/dispossession of, 46 historical contextualization, 57 impacts of colonialism, 28 and the Wunderkammer (curiosity cabinet), 35, 70, 71 Hokusai landscapes, 90 The Home of Cheryl Towers, Toll Bar Village near Doncaster, UK, June 2007 (Mendel), 110 The Home of Godspower Kanz, Igbogene, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, November 2012, 110 Horizontal circuits, 89 Hornaday, William T., 52, 52n30 Horton, Jessica, 20, 20n45 How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic .MOV File (Steyerl), 99 Huber, Stephan, 155 Huffington, Ariana, 178 Huffman, Kathy Rae, 155 Huggan, Graham, 176, 177 Human-nonhuman/human-nature binaries as artificial, 21, 44 deprioritizing the human, 192 destroying, 5, 43, 140, 168–169, 183 diffractive understanding, 23 and entanglement, 143 and expanded concept of border art, 190 influences on, 66 and the romanticization of nature, 168 and techno-centric solutions to climate crisis, 45 understanding historical constructs, 48 See also Romanticism Humans as animals, 183 de-centering, 13

 INDEX 

and global inequality, 18 as planetary colonizer, 5 population growth, 18–19, 18n4 presence of in Watershed Cairns, 192 recognizing alien within, 15 as spokesperson for the nonhuman, 173 Hurricane Katrina, 161 I Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 178 An Inconvenient Truth (Gore), 24 Indigenous peoples animism, 20, 20n45 appropriation of iconography, 94 cultural importance of bears, 177n41 deflection and absorption of, 46 and environmental crisis, 46 erasure/dispossession of, 46, 187, 189 and tribal lands, 143 violence against, 94, 142 See also Repellent Fence installation (Postcommodity) Industrialization environmental impacts, 91, 133, 137 as slow violence, 38, 91 slow violence of, 38, 91 See also Drowning World (Mendel); Manthan (Galhotra); New Landscapes series (Yao) Interconnectedness ecologically responsible design, 59 as an over-used concept, 5 rejections of, 36 See also Harman, Graham; New materialism; Objects, object oriented ontology (OOO)

217

The Internet accessibility issues, 69 carbon footprint, 1, 3, 4, 75 and database forms of art, 68 Google Maps, 155 Google searches, 2, 75, 192 promise for addressing environmental crisis, 3 and unequal access to technology, 4 See also Digital art; Eco art Intra-action, 143 J Jeff and Tracey Waters, Staines-uponThames, Surrey, UK (Mendel), 108 Jiang Pengyi, 38, 89, 90, 94, 101, 105, 192 apocalyptic vision, 94 depictions of slow violence, 38, 101 documentary photography, 94 manipulation of scale in digital images, 38, 90, 94 Jodi.org, 154 Johnson, Walter, 153 Jordan, Chris, 133, 192 Joseph and Endurance Edem, with their children Godfreedom and Josephine, Igbogene, Bayelsa State, Nigeria (Mendel), 108 Judd, Donald, 57 K Käfer, Bernadette, 6, 7 Kanngieser, Anja, 49, 49n25 Kant, Immanuel, 134 Kanwar, Amar, 39, 120, 138–141, 143, 144, 147 See also The Scene of Crime (Kanwar) Karwan, David, 65

218 

INDEX

Khandelwal, Brij, 144 Kirshner, Mia, 173 Kiva microfinancing website, 78 Klein, Norman M., 65 Kohn, Margaret, 180 L Land Art anthropocentrism, 31 ecological sensibility, 33, 54 and environmentalism, 59 and scale, 60, 61, 64 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 64 What is Missing? as, 64 Landscape (Chin), 31 Landscape genre depictions of human impacts, 106 “Floodlines” series (Mendel), 106 “landscape” as a term, 106 Mendel’s reliance on, 106 modes of representation in Yao’s photography, 79, 92 and the relationship between humans and the earth, 93 role in eco art, 31 and the romanticization of nature, 167–168 in The Scene of Crime, 143 valuing of, 156 in What is Missing?, 82 See also New Landscapes series (Yao); Romanticism; The “toxic sublime” Landscape into Eco Art (Cheetham), 31 Latour, Bruno, 82, 173, 173n36, 174 Leivick, Daniel, 190 To Life: Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Weintraub), 30, 41 A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (Barrada), 15

Lightning Field (de Maria), 63, 63n57 Lin, Maya, 29, 32, 34, 35, 38, 41–43, 48–59, 53n34, 63, 64, 67–72, 74, 76, 80, 82, 85, 107, 137, 140, 170, 192 drawing connections, 55, 57 emphasis on rewriting the historical separation of human from nonhuman, 48 expanded perspective on ecological crisis, 51 initial sketches for the Vietnam memorial, 55, 59 physically grounded monuments, 52 Storm King Wavefield, 54, 58 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 42, 52, 54, 57, 59 See also What is Missing? (Lin) Lists, as disjunctive, 82 Local Histories/Global Designs (Mignolo), 148 M MacKinnon, JB, 173 Mahabharata, Samudra Manthan episode, 120, 123, 123n24, 134 Maisel, David, 133, 134 Making Visible the Invisible (Seattle Public Library), 70 Manifest Destiny, 152, 187 Manovich, Lev, 35, 83 Manthan (Galhotra) as border thinking, 130, 135 as diffraction, 39 digital media in, 35 and the emotional life of water, 119 focus on poison, 123 implication of the audience, 123n24, 133, 137 inseparability of victim and the site of victimhood, 133

 INDEX 

legality in, 144 multiple entangled dimensions of, 144 and otherworldly nature of imagery, 138 political import, 133 privileging of local knowledge, 144 sacred-profane interactivity, 120, 136, 145 and the Samudra Manthan legend, 120, 123, 123n24, 134 summary, 116 toxic foam in, 130 and the “toxic sublime,” 132, 133, 137 Manufactured Landscapes (Burtynsky), 132 Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis) (Smithson), 157, 158 Map series (Bartholl), 155, 158 Maps/mapping, 18, 29, 37–39, 38n87, 41–83, 85, 115, 137, 139, 140n65, 147, 152, 154–158, 163, 168, 171, 172, 174, 176, 181, 183, 185, 189, 192 Martine, Cristóbal, 187n3 Maslin, Mark A., 19n44 Materializing effects, 24, 168 Materializing effects of boundarymaking, 143 Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Munster), 35 Matter/mattering, 5, 7, 8, 11–13, 21–24, 26, 27, 29, 32, 36, 39, 47, 69, 73, 81, 123, 125, 127–129, 143, 144, 149, 153, 156, 164, 176, 181 McKibben, Bill, 45, 67 McLuhan, Eric, 6n10 McLuhan, Marshall, 6, 6n10, 66

219

Mendel, Gideon, 35, 38, 39, 89, 105–115, 137, 140, 161, 192 dependence on interconnectivity, 115 depictions of slow violence, 89 documentary photography, 35, 39 fact-based imagery, 112 flood symbolism, 89, 106, 112, 113, 115 playing with scale, 113 viewing humans in terms of objects, 192 See also Drowning World (Mendel) Mendes, Jeremy, 35, 39, 148, 170, 173, 176, 180 See also Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes) Mestaoui, Nazhia, 75–79, 95n20 See also 1 Heart 1 Tree (Mestaoui) Microfinancing/microcredit, 78, 79 Mignolo, Walter D., 26–29, 129, 148, 149, 153, 154, 169 anthropocentric focus, 28 border thinking theory, 26, 27, 29, 129, 148, 153 decolonizing/ disempowerment, 27, 29 on colonial power, 149 Migrants, see Climate migrants, refugees Mimetic realism, 50 Minimalism, 57, 57n40 Mining, see Slow violence Misra, Anil Kumar, 120n17 Mississippi River watershed as amorphous, interconnected area in flux, 148 confluence with the Missouri, symbolic meanings, 152 floods, 160 See also Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan) Mitchell, W. J. T., 31 Modi, Narendra, 139, 139n62

220 

INDEX

Moeller-Gaa, Ben, 160 Mohan, C. Raja, 123n24 Moll, Joana, 1–5, 2n3, 4n7, 12, 36, 37, 40, 75, 192 See also Deforest (DEFOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOREST) (Moll) Monk by the Sea (Friedrich), 136 Monteiro, Fabrice, 192 Monuments/memorials. Lin’s, 29, 32, 34, 38, 41–43, 48, 51–59, 53n34, 70, 71, 74, 187 See also What is Missing? (Lin) Moore, Alexander, 128 Morton, Timothy, 7, 12, 12n21, 29, 43, 44, 47–49, 67, 74, 99, 105, 112, 116, 168, 175, 176 on ambience, 99, 105, 112 art as a demonic force, 12 on ecology without nature, 43, 175 on human-nature binary, 44 on kitsch, 74 on romanticizing of nature, 168 on sonic history, 49 Mosquera, Gerardo, 88, 113 Mother bears, see Bear; Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes) Mountain and Straw Houses in the Summer (Yao Lu), 90, 91 Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, 26n58 Munster, Anna, 30, 35, 36, 48, 70, 71 Muntadas, Antoni, 42, 68, 70, 72 See also File Room (Muntadas) Muoio, Adrian, 123 “My desktop” (jodi.org), 2n2 N Naming, politics of, 138n58 Nature human separation from, 44, 168 romanticization and commodification of, 47

social construction of through landscape, 107 See also Human-nonhuman/ human-nature binaries “Nature’s Queer Performativity” (Barad), 169 Neoliberal, 18, 67, 76, 97, 108 Net.art genre archival impulse, 27 map graphics, 154 in What is Missing?, 42, 67, 68, 71 Neukom Vivarium (Dion), 3, 4, 36n81 New Communalism, 64–67 New Delhi, India, 118, 119, 137 See also The Yamuna, India; Toxic City (Rabehi) New Landscapes series (Yao) absence of human forms, 97 ambiguity in, 89, 91, 93 digital manipulation, 38, 89, 90, 94 Early Spring on Lake Dongting, 91 Fishing Boats Berthed by the Mount Yu, 91, 93 Global South/Global North dynamic, 112 Mountain and Straw Houses in the Summer, 90, 91 Overlapping Waves and Lush Trees (Yao Lu), 91 as portrayal of “slow violence,” 85–114 temporal and scalar disconnects, 98 New materialism and the agency/vitality of the nonhuman, 21 and border thinking in ecoart, 159–164 and the cairns and Bear 71 as objects, 182 combining with decolonial though to address climate crisis, 16–17, 24

 INDEX 

criticism of and dehumanization, 16–17 independent agent of material forces, 116 intersection with decolonization, 16–17 and Mendel’s visual rhetoric, 106 and objects in Kanwar’s work on Odisha, 139 reevaluation of objects and matter, 8 truth-telling, 11 See also Objects New media as dematerialized imagery, 35 digital manipulation in, 35 Monovich’s principles for, 35 See also Eco art Niagara Falls, NY, 43 Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario (Burtynsky), 131 Nigeria, Guinea worm eradication efforts, 126n32 The Nile, paradoxical association of holiness and pollution, 124 Nisbet, James, 30, 33, 61, 65, 74, 82 Nixon, Rob, 19, 19n43, 38, 87, 88, 93, 99, 105, 108, 109n46, 192 See also Slow violence Nnamdi, Basil Sunday, 18 Non-site series (Smithson), 157 O Objects Anti-archive series (Harbage Page), 190 applying border thinking to, 28 as autonomous, 8 cairns, 151, 162, 182 connections and disconnections among, 2, 3, 6 disobedient, 182–183

221

distinctive/withdrawn, 6, 9, 10, 34, 36 entanglement with the discursive, 22, 164, 189 inner vitality of, 154 in Kanwar’s work, 139 in Mendel’s work, 111 as metaphor, 6, 8, 10 nomadic entities, 148 object-oriented ontology (OOO), 3, 6–9, 13, 15, 25, 34, 140 and power flow between humans and nonhumans, 8 reevaluating understandings of, 7 subject-object divide, overcoming, 27, 154 translation, 10–12 vital materialism of, 15, 110, 154 withdrawn, 6, 9, 10, 34, 36 withdrawn objects, 6, 9, 10, 34, 36 See also Eco art; Humannonhuman/human-nature binaries; New materialism Objects in the Landscape (Harbage Page), 190, 190n10 Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 139 Occidenalism, 26n59 Odisha state, India, 30, 34, 120, 138–141, 144, 145 Oestigaard, Terje, 124–126, 129 1 Heart 1 Tree (Mestaoui) approach to digital activism, 75 funding structure, 79 impacts of viewer activism, 78 projection onto the Eiffel Tower, 75 An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller), 59 Osodi, George, 11 Östör, Ákos, 127–130 Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development), 97

222 

INDEX

Overlapping Waves and Lush Trees (Yao Lu), 91 Oxygen, dissolved, 119, 130 P Paglen, Trevor, 99 Palin, Sarah, 178, 178n46 Pangaro, Paul, 66 Papanek, Victor, 59 Park Bridge 2 (Reuter and Rowan), 164 Parry, Jonathan, 128 Peeples, Jennifer, 132, 133, 135 “Personal” section (What is Missing? Lin), 80 Photography and challenges of depicting slow violence, 38, 89, 99 digital manipulation in Yao’s and Jiang’s work, 35, 38, 89, 90, 94 documentary, and eco art, 11 documentary photography, 175 documentary photography/film, 34 early, and projection, 77 photofilmic image-making, 102 posthuman photorealism, 104 value for documenting slow violence, 89 See also Landscape genre; The “toxic sublime” Planet Earth, 179 Pocock, Felix, 155 Polar bears, 13, 13n23, 24n55, 176, 177 Politics of Nature (Latour), 173 Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (Banerjee and Duflo), 78 The Population Bomb (Brower and Erlich), 45 Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984 (Sheren), 26, 157

Postcommodity, 187–191 See also Repellent Fence installation (Postcommodity) Posthuman photorealism, 104 Postmodern society, 55 Power relationships and border ecology, 149 disempowerment through border thinking, 27 drones and, 98, 99 See also Colonialism; Slow violence Powers of Ten (C. and R. Eames), 60 Pravinchandra, Shital, 17, 21 The Prophecy series (Monteiro), 192 Puerto Rico, in What is Missing?, 10, 53, 81 Punke, Michael, 178 Purdy, Jedediah, 46, 47 Q Qing dynasty landscapes, 90 Queer critters, 169, 173, 182 R Rabehi, Zacharie, 135–137 See also Toxic City (Rabehi) Rafman, Jon, 155 Raouché & Dalieh (Azar), 102 Raouché, Lebanon, neighborhood, 102, 103 Raptor’s Rapture (Allora and Calzadilla), 6, 10–12 Ray, Sara Jaquette, 131, 132 Reforestation, funding approaches, 79 Religious beliefs, representing, 126, 137 Repellent Fence installation (Postcommodity), 185, 188, 189, 191 See also Indigenous peoples Requiem for a Glacier (Walde), 49

 INDEX 

Returning a Sound (Allora and Calzadilla), 10 Reuter, Libby, 39, 148, 152, 154–159, 161, 163, 164, 166–168, 182 aesthetics and, 154, 161, 168, 182 Elsah Flood, June 2013, 159–161 FLOWer Sewer, 161, 163 Silver Creek Spire, 155, 156, 158, 159, 163, 166 See also Cairns; Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan) The Revenant (Punke), 178 “The Richard Mutt Case” (Wood, Roche, Duchamp), 9 Rist, Gilbert, 96–98, 97n25 Romanticism the “blue marble” image, 65, 73, 74 in #Crazyweather (Switzer), 74 human-nonhuman/human-nature binaries, 170 links with commodification, 168 and nature as sublime, 46, 99, 168, 176 techno-utopianism as, 54, 59, 66, 83 and “the wild,” 43 See also The “toxic sublime” Rowan, Joshua, 39, 148, 152, 154–159, 161–164, 166–168, 182 Elsah Flood, June 2013, 159–161 FLOWer Sewer, 161, 163, 166 Park Bridge 2 and Tethys Meramec Stump, 164 Silver Creek Spire - Pond, 150, 159 use of aesthetics to upend viewer expectations, 168 use of light, 162 See also Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan) Ruby, Jay, 128, 128n40 Running the Numbers series (Jordan), 192

223

S The sacred, paradoxical connection with pollution, 124, 129 See also Enchantment; The Ganges, India; The Yamuna, India Sacred sites, 127n34, 127n35 Sadao, Shoji, 167, 168 St. Louis, MO, 39, 148, 152–156, 158, 162, 163, 168, 169, 182 Samadrusti Media activist group, 138 Samudra Manthan legend, 120, 123, 123n24, 134 Sardinia, mining industry, 100, 102 Scale in Drowning World, 107 Heizer’s focus on, 32, 33, 60, 61, 189 in Land Art, 32–34 shifting, in What is Missing?, 85 as theme in Yao’s and Jiang’s work, 89, 90, 95 Scars & Borders series (Azar) bauxite mining, 100 Bauxite Pool and Raouché and Dalieh vignettes, 98, 99, 101–104 as depiction of “slow violence,” 38, 89, 98, 112, 192 use of drone photography to document uncanny spaces, 98 The Scene of Crime (Kanwar) absence of interpretive voice, 138 biopolitical ramifications, 144 border ecology of, 143 description of, 120 disjunctive imagery in, 140 entanglement revealed in, 39 landscape in, 138–141, 143 “Map 4,” 147 objects in, 139, 140, 143 organization of, 139 respect for people of Odisha state, 120, 138, 140, 144 text overlay, 138

224 

INDEX

Schama, Simon, 32 Scharoun, Hans, 167 Scheerbart, Paul, 167 Scott, Felicity D., 64, 64n60, 65n61 Screensavers, 73, 74 Serra, Richard, 57 Serres, Michel, 92, 92n15, 94 Silent Spring (Carson), 13, 25, 45, 51, 51n28, 58, 61 Silver Creek Spire series (Reuter and Rowan), 150, 155, 156, 158, 159, 163, 166 Sinha, Indra, 87, 88 Slow violence Azar’s depictions using droneenabled aesthetic of ambience, 99 Bauxite Pool (Azar), 98, 101 Chakrabarty’s three histories, 92, 93 challenges of representing, 38 depicting durational qualities, 104 depicting, value of eco-art, 87, 112 and extractive industries, 87, 138 in Manthan, 192 and modernization, 87 in New Landscapes, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 112 new materialist approaches, 99, 105, 112 Nixon’s formulation, 87, 93, 105 and representations of overlooked spaces, 38 in The Scene of the Crime, 138 See also Scale; Unregistered City series (Jiang), temporal and scalar disconnects Smith, Terry, 104, 104n37 Smithson, Robert, 32, 33, 62, 63, 64n59, 157, 158, 191 blurring boundaries between artificial and natural, 157 focus on scale, 32

Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), 157, 158 Non-site concept, 157 See also Spiral Jetty (Smithson) Sound Allora’s and Calzadilla’s use of, 6, 10, 11 in Bauxite Pool, 101 in Bear 71 (Allison and Mendes), 35, 170, 173, 174, 176, 180 Biosphere Soundscapes Project, 49 eco-critical sound art, 49 in What is Missing?, 85 South Yorkshire, UK, floods, 107, 108 The Sovereign Forest (Kanwar), 39, 138, 144, 147 Sovereign Forest vs. The Union of India, 140n65 Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 32, 62, 63, 63n55, 158 Spiritual beliefs, see The sacred, paradoxical connection with pollution Steedman, Carolyn, 69, 70 Steyerl, Hito, 99 Stilgoe, John R., 32 Storm King Wavefield, 41n2, 54, 58 Streitberger, Alexander, 102, 102n34, 104n37, 107n44, 111n51 Striated space, 103 Stuffed bears/teddy bears, 24n55, 177, 178 Sturken, Marita, 55n36, 57 Subject-object divide, see Objects “Submerged Portraits” (Mendel), 106, 109, 111 Sudbury, Ontario, nickel tailings, 131 “Sustainable” development, 97 Swarup, Manish (Associated Press), 135, 136 Switzer, Sharon, 71–74 Systems theory, 25, 58

 INDEX 

T Taut, Bruno, 167 Technology drones, and organic-inorganic subjectivity, 104, 105 and the “humanizing” of the nonhuman, 104–105 and human separation from nature, 5 and techno-centric solutions to climate crisis, 45 techno-utopianism, 42 the Whole Earth Catalog project, 64, 65, 67, 73 Tethys Meramec Stump (Reuter and Rowan), 164, 166, 167 Three Gorges Dam, China, 97, 109n46 Tiete River, Brazil, 131 Tilted Arc (Serra), 57 Timescales/temporality in Azar’s work, 105 Chakravarty’s three histories, 92 as destabilizing, 89, 104 entangled approach to contamination, 192 in Lin’s physically grounded monuments, 52 in New Landscapes and Unregistered Cities, 89, 98 in Silver Creek Spire, 158 Unregistered City series, 90, 96 in What is Missing?, 51–53 See also Slow violence Todd, Zoe, 20 Toxic City (Rabehi), 135, 136 Toxic foam, 130 The “toxic sublime,” 130–138, 161, 168 Transgender becoming, 16 Trans- or inter-species morphing, 149 Translation, 10–12, 49n25, 74, 127

225

Trees, digital, see Deforest (DEFOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOREST) (Moll); 1 Heart 1 Tree (Mestaoui) Truman, Harry, 96 Turner, Fred, 64, 74 Twist, Kade, 187n3 Twitter activism, 71n81 U Ugiomoh, Frank, 18 Unregistered City series (Jiang), 94, 96, 103 absence of human forms, 97 confluence of decay and development, 95 and the dynamic of Global South/ Global North, 112 scalar and temporal disjuncture, 89, 96 on slow violence associated with city growth, 94 striated space in, 103 temporal and scalar disconnects, 98 title, meaning, 96 Unregistered City #8, 95 Unregistered City 2, 94 (Untitled) Drones (Paglen), 99 Urbanization, 85, 90, 98, 119, 133 See also Land development; Slow violence U.S.-Mexico border, 28, 30, 186, 189 See also Repellent Fence installation (Postcommodity) V Vaccaro, Jeanne, 16, 16n32 Vallabhacharya, 118, 131, 134 See also The Yamuna, India Valla, Clement, 155

226 

INDEX

Van der Rohe, Mies, 167 Van Dijk, Jose, 81, 82 Varanasi (Benares), India, 118 Varma, Dilip, 140 Vedanta mining corporation, 139 Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Bennett), 110 Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Lin), 42, 52, 54, 57, 64 The Vietnam war, 54, 55, 57 Viewers, see Audience Vishu Purana, Samudra Manthan episode, 120 Visitor’s Guide to London (Bunting), 154–155 Vital materialism, 13, 15, 20, 21, 110, 150, 154, 159–164 See also Enchantment W Walde, Paul, 49 Water, emotional life of, 119 See also Drowning World (Mendel); The Ganges, India; The Yamuna, India; Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan) Watershed Cairns (Reuter and Rowan), 39, 148, 152, 154, 157, 167 cairns as border crossers, 39, 182, 192 and the complexity of border ecology, 40 dialogues between website, physical site, and image of the site, 157 eco-political aims, 182 Elsah Flood, June 2013, 161 FLOWer Sewer, 161 mapping of the Mississippi watershed, 153, 154, 182 material/immaterial interplay, 164 the Mississippi as symbol, 152

Park Bridge, 164 reference to Romantic landscapes, 164 scope, 150 shifting boundaries in, 148 Tethys Meramec Stump, 164 virtual presence, 154–155 Wave behavior, 22 Wavefield (Lin), 64 Weiner, Norbert, 25 Weintraub, Linda, 30, 31, 38n87, 41 Wertheim, Margaret and Christine, 16 Western epistemic framework art objects responding to, 10–11 limitations, 133 and the sublime, 131 See also The Anthropocene; Colonialism; Romanticism What is Missing? (Lin), 29, 32, 34, 38, 38n87, 40–43, 48–54, 58, 59, 63, 64, 67–76, 78–83, 85, 91n14, 137, 140, 170, 191 audio portion, as “passive” nature recording, 49 as a boundary object, 29, 38, 42 categorizations of, 41 conflation of facts and memories, 52, 67, 82 as contained space, 71 and digital activism, 75 disjunctive imagery in, 63, 82–83, 140 incompleteness in, 53 mechanics, immersive elements, 38n87, 50, 63, 191–192 as new media, 35 “Personal” section, memories in, 80–81 scalar shifts, 64 silences, 38, 43, 85, 137 temporal focus, 51–52 unevenness of, 70

 INDEX 

versions, revisions, 48, 80 as a “whole earth” image, 63, 67 When Faith Moves Mountains (Alÿs), 31 Whole Earth Catalog, 64, 65, 67, 67n71, 73 “Whole earth” movement, 33 See also Earthworks Whyte, Ian Boyd, 167 Wild, Lorraine, 65 The wild/wilderness, 47, 170, 180 See also Land development; Romanticism Withdrawn objects, 6, 34, 36 Wohlgemuth, Eva, 155 Women’s Table (Lin), 52 Wunderkammer (curiosity cabinet), 35, 70, 71 Wwww.jodi.org, 154 Y Yamuna (goddess), 118 The Yamuna, India cleanup, 126 cultural and spiritual importance, 118

227

dead bodies in, 120n17, 124, 124n28 death of, 120n17, 125 emotional life, 119 as environmentally “dead,” 119, 136 fish kills, 120, 120n17 global notoriety, 135 headwaters, length, and course, 118, 125, 136 multiple entangled dimensions of, 120 Ocean of Milk, 134, 145 as symbolically pure despite pollution, 124 toxic foam, 130 Yamunastakam (Vallabhacarya), 118 Yao Lu, 35, 38, 89–91, 93, 94, 96, 101, 105, 112, 113, 192 allusion to myth, 91 deliberate ambiguity, 91 demands on viewer, 112, 113 depictions of slow violence, 106 documentary photography, 35, 93, 94, 101 manipulation of scale in digital images, 35, 38, 89, 90, 94 See also New Landscapes series (Yao)